Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 020 - Virtue Meets Its Match - Plato's Gorgias.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Virtue meets its match, Plato's Gorgias. Ancient philosophers spent a lot of time arguing about the nature of the good life. One of their most abiding themes was the question of how to live. In particular, they usually wanted to show us that the best way to live is to be virtuous. But why be virtuous? You could instead follow the example of, say, Archelaus, the king of Macedon, who seized power by killing several of his family members including his own seven-year-old half-brother, whom he tossed into a well and drowned. Okay, that might sound a bit radical, but can we really be sure that Archelaus made the wrong choice? He may have had blood on his hands, but those hands held the reins of power in a mighty state. And let's be honest, we've all performed the odd misdeed to get what we want, so why not go for broke and perform these most outrageous injustices if it will allow us to fulfill our desires? Not just today, but for the rest of our lives, exercising absolute power as a tyrant. This is a central question posed in Plato's dialogues, and never with more urgency than in his early masterpiece, the Gorgias. We've already met the namesake of the dialogue in an earlier episode about the Sophists. Gorgias was a teacher of rhetoric, and as you might recall from that episode, the author of several works which still survive today, and which show off his way with words as well as his conviction that words have an almost irresistible power. You might also remember that Plato, in dialogue after dialogue, pits Socrates against opponents who are Sophists and teachers of rhetoric. We already saw an example last week in Plato's Euthydemus, and the verbal sparring there is typical of these encounters, which frequently seem more like competitions than dispassionate discussions of truth. In the Gorgias, Socrates trades verbal blows not only with Gorgias himself, but also with two of Gorgias' followers, Polis and Callicles. Even though the dialogue came to be named after Gorgias, it is Callicles who cuts the most memorable figure as a passionate defender of immorality. In no dialogue does Socrates, the champion of virtue, meet up with a more formidable opponent. Last week we saw how Plato's Carmades poses as an inquiry into virtue, but turns out to be an inquiry into knowledge. We'll see another example of that platonic trick next week when we look at the Meno. But in the Gorgias something like the reverse happens. Socrates says he wants to discover what rhetoric is, but he winds up mounting a defense of the virtuous life. When the action begins, Socrates and his friend Hierophant are meeting up with Gorgias and his fellow rhetoricians, Polis and Callicles. Whereas Polis and Callicles are relative beginners in rhetoric, Gorgias is already accepted as a master. He is just given a display speech and is an honored guest at Callicles' house. Socrates wants to hear what the famous Gorgias has to say, but not in the form of a finely wrought speech. Instead, Socrates wants, well, what he always wants. He wants to have a conversation about virtue. Happily, Gorgias boasts that he can speak with unequalled brevity if called upon to do so. He is just as good at the cut and thrust of debate as he is at delivering long, ornate speeches. This belongs to his expertise, his art. Socrates proceeds to lock horns with him over this very question. What is the art which Gorgias claims to have mastered and to be able to teach? The art, of course, is rhetoric. But what's rhetoric, exactly? Carpenters make things out of wood, doctors make us healthy, what do rhetoricians do? According to Gorgias, rhetoric is an art having to do with speech. Not just any old speech, but speech about, as he says, the greatest of human concerns. The man who has mastered rhetoric can go into the court or the public council and get his audience to believe whatever he likes. In short, the art of rhetoric is the art of speech which is persuasive. In fact, very persuasive. As we saw in an earlier episode, the real historical Gorgias in his defense speech of Helen argued that if Helen was persuaded to go to Troy using words, then she was in effect compelled to go, just as surely as if she'd been dragged there by force. Against a truly effective speaker, there is no defense. The Gorgias presented by Plato would agree with this. He tells Socrates that if a doctor and a rhetorician debate in front of an audience about how best to cure a patient, the audience will agree with the rhetorician and not the doctor. He gives examples to prove his point. For instance, it was the great orator Pericles who persuaded the Athenians to build a defensive wall, not a bunch of stonemasons who are experts in wall building. So if you teach someone rhetoric, you have in effect given them a powerful weapon. Thus armed, a man can control his city. He can literally get away with murder by killing someone and then using honeyed words to get himself acquitted of the charge. He could also, as we've just seen, persuade someone to ignore the advice of a doctor. But as we saw in the episode on the Sophist, Gorgias argues that we shouldn't blame the teacher in a case like this. We should blame the student, who misuses the art for evil instead of good. A teacher of rhetoric is like a teacher of boxing. Sure, he's taught his students to beat people up, but it's not his fault if the students go off and use their newfound prowess to clobber their friends or parents. Socrates is surprised at all this. Surely Gorgias can also teach people how to be good? In which case the student certainly will not go off and use their rhetorical superpowers for evil instead of good. This is a crucial moment in the dialogue. Gorgias, perhaps embarrassed to say he can't tell someone the difference between good and evil, agrees with Socrates that he could teach goodness as well as rhetoric. Plato is probably playing fast and loose here. The claim to teach virtue is strongly associated with some Sophists like Protagoras, but the historical Gorgias apparently did not make any such claim. Evidence from other sources has him claiming to teach only rhetoric and not virtue. Plato has, it seems, had his fictional Gorgias say something the real Gorgias was careful not to say. In doing so, the fictional Gorgias has left himself open to a series of Socratic punches. Later on in the dialogue, Socrates makes the rather cheap but nonetheless amusing point that Sophists are always complaining that their students cheat them by not paying their fees, which is odd, given that the Sophists have taught these same students to be good. But there's a deeper problem with Gorgias' position. He said that the whole point of rhetoric is to make a speaker persuasive whether or not they know what they are talking about. The rhetorician will be more persuasive than the doctor on the matter of health, for instance. But it's the doctor who can tell you what would really be good to do about that nagging cough. The rhetorician has no idea. Similarly, if it's a matter of reaching a decision in the democratic assembly of Athens, the rhetorician can persuade the assembly to do whatever he wants them to do, but this art of persuasion will not give the rhetorician any insight into what the assembly really should do. Unless that is, rhetoric turns out after all to be a knowledge of good and evil, of justice and injustice. In that case, it really would be the knowledge of the greatest of human concerns, as Gorgias has boasted. But Gorgias has described rhetoric as producing persuasion in the absence of knowledge. Rhetoric is starting to look like the art of convincing people to make mistakes. Once Socrates gets this far, Gorgias' supporter Polis can no longer restrain himself. He interrupts and demands that Socrates say what he thinks rhetoric is. Socrates explains to Polis that as far as he's concerned, rhetoric isn't really an art at all. It's more like a know-how or a knack. He compares it, and I'll warn you in advance that this next bit may make you hungry, he compares it to knowing how to make pastries. If you ask people to vote on who they'd rather have feeding them, they'll take the pastry chef over the dietitian any time. The pastry chef offers croissants, including those nice ones with the almond filling, whereas the dietitian tells you to eat raw carrots. I don't know about you, but I'm going with the pastry chef. Rhetoric is the same. The rhetorician can flatter and please an audience, but he can't tell the audience what is really good for them. At this point, Polis is incredulous. Socrates is making rhetoric sound like some mean kind of trickery when actually we all know it is majestic in its power. A really good rhetorician will rule in his city, as Pericles and Themistocles did in Athens. He can have his enemies put to death, can do whatever he likes whenever he likes. The art of rhetoric, in other words, confers the sort of power held by a tyrant like Archelaus, the Macedonian king I mentioned at the start of this episode. Polis gives Archelaus as an example of the sort of untrammeled domination he has in mind. And who cares whether rhetoric can tell us what we should really do if it gives us this kind of absolute power? The appeal of the rhetorician, his sail pitch, if you will, is obvious. If you're a young Athenian gentleman who hopes to grow into a position of eminence and prestige, and pretty much all young Athenian gentlemen wanted this, then you should hire a rhetorician. Socrates is not impressed. He insists that without knowledge and wisdom, the rhetoricians may put to death whoever they want, but that doesn't mean they are really powerful. True power is being able to do what is really good for you. If a tyrant or a rhetorician, blundering in his ignorance, uses his so-called power to put to death those who try to give him good advice, then he is actually harming himself as well as his city. Again, Polis scoffs. As if Socrates wouldn't gladly assume the power of life and death if it was handed to him. Socrates replies that for him, the power to put someone to death unjustly is no power at all. In fact, he'd far rather be put to death unjustly himself than put someone else to death without good reason. Here we've come to one of Socrates' most famous doctrines, that it is better to suffer wrongdoing than to do wrong oneself. A man like Archelaus may seem to Polis to be the happiest man in Macedonia, but in fact he is the most miserable, and certainly more miserable than a man who is, for instance, unjustly tortured to death. Better to be tortured to death unjustly than to order that this torture be carried out. Now, I know what you're thinking, it's the same thing that Polis is thinking, namely that Socrates can hardly be serious. Would anyone really prefer to be put to death unjustly than to do wrong himself? Well yes, actually, Socrates for one was fairly cheerful about being put to death unjustly. Not that Socrates wanted to be put to death, but it was a matter of relative indifference to him, whereas he put the highest possible value on his own virtue. But does Socrates have an argument for this attitude, or does he just want to lead by example? He's Socrates, of course he has an argument. And here it is. He gets Polis to agree that justice is a good thing, and injustice a bad thing. But things are good either because they are pleasant, or because they are beneficial, or both. Justice is not much fun, as we all know, all that telling the truth and paying back our debts. So, if justice is a good thing, it can't be because it's pleasant, it must be because it's beneficial. With unjust things it will be the opposite, since they're bad, they must be either unpleasant or harmful, or both. Obviously, being an unjust tyrant isn't unpleasant, in fact it's a non-stop orgy of pleasure, what with all the feasting and chuckling as one devises new and innovative ways to put one's enemies to death. So if injustice is a bad thing, it can only be because it's harmful. If we combine this with the point Socrates made against Gorgias earlier, we get the classically Socratic position on virtue. Virtue is knowing how to get what is really good, so it leads us to whatever is most beneficial. People who lack virtue are those who quite literally don't know what is good for them, and who are thus apt to choose what is harmful for them. Of course the more vicious you are, the worse it will be for you to have the political power Pola so admires, because you will use this so-called power to inflict ever greater harm on yourself. This Socratic position looks pretty convincing, at least from a certain point of view. When we consider monstrous tyrants like Caligula, we don't think of them as happy people, they destroy themselves as well as their people with outsized appetites and poor judgement. Without power and wealth, Caligula would just have been an oversexed thug. But as emperor he was in a position to inflict huge damage on everyone nearby, and no one was nearer to Caligula than Caligula himself. Or if you prefer think of a more down to earth example like a drug addict. A drug addict will be worse off if he has more money, because he will use the money to buy drugs that harm him. On the other hand, there's something that might disturb us about Socrates' defense of virtue. Do we really think that we should be virtuous because it will benefit us? This seems strangely self-centered. We might even want to insist that virtue is admirable precisely because virtuous people are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of others. We don't think that Mother Teresa was admirable because she had such a good understanding of what was good for Mother Teresa. We think she was admirable because to her, the welfare of the poor was at least as important as her own welfare. So one could perhaps admit that Socrates has mounted a good defense of virtue, but accuse him of failing to defend altruism. In fact, he hasn't even tried to defend altruism. Maybe this is because he's trying to persuade the self-centered Polis that virtue is the right choice. He's appealing to what Polis would find persuasive. But as we'll see in future episodes, Socrates was not the only ancient philosopher to put forward a strikingly egocentric argument for the life of virtue. Be that as it may, the next attack to come at Socrates is not from this direction at all. Instead, when the bell rings for round three, Socrates finds himself facing an even more radical opponent, Calicles. Calicles accuses Socrates of exploiting the feelings of shame felt by both Gorgias and Polis. It was shame which led Gorgias to make the tactical mistake of saying he could teach his students virtue. And it was shame that led Polis to make the crucial concession that justice is a good thing and injustice a bad thing. In fact, Calicles says, Polis should have said the exact opposite. It is justice which is bad and injustice good. Justice is merely the set of conventional rules that society uses to keep the strongest people in line. The law of nature says the opposite. The strongest person should get the greatest rewards. What would these rewards consist in? Not the glow of self-righteous justice that Socrates so admires, but rather what is naturally rather than conventionally good, namely power and pleasure. Calicles thinks, then, that justice is nothing but a trick for getting the strong to surrender their natural right to seize as much pleasure as they can handle. Socrates rightly recognizes that Calicles is raising a serious challenge, one more difficult to defeat than anything Polis has said. Calicles' speech, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to the critique of morality made by no less a figure than Nietzsche. However, Socrates focuses on an aspect of Calicles' view that is not particularly Nietzschean, namely its hedonism. The word hedonism comes from the Greek word hedonē, meaning pleasure, so hedonism is the view that pleasure is the good. Socrates thinks that the life Calicles describes in which every desire is constantly being satisfied sounds more like a life of slavery than mastery. To explain why, he presents a kind of allegory which he takes from certain Sicilian or Italian wise men. This may be an allusion to Empedocles or to the Pythagorean tradition more generally. To simplify slightly, the allegory compares the soul to a jar, like the earthen jars used for holding water and wine in ancient Greece. The hedonistic seeker of pleasures is a man whose jar is full of leaks, so that water rushes out of the jar even as he's desperately pouring it in. The temperate person, by contrast, is like a man with a sealed and watertight jar, which never loses any of its contents. The allegory represents a fundamental flaw of hedonism, which is that pleasure seeking is an endless task. As soon as you've sated yourself at one banquet, you start getting hungry again. As the next day dawns, you have to worry about your next banquet, and the more it takes to satisfy you, the harder it is to get hold of the next round of pleasures. Far better to content oneself with as little as possible so that one is spared the trouble. Calicles sticks to his guns, insisting that he'd rather be someone whose jar is full of holes, so that the water can flow out rapidly and he can fill it with new pleasures. He admires the life of insatiable appetite, even when Socrates tries to show him that there is just as much pain involved in such a life as pleasure. The life of the sealed jars, as far as Calicles is concerned, may as well be the life of a stone. As their argument goes on, it becomes clear that Calicles and Socrates are not going to reach agreement. In fact, they share so little common ground, and Calicles is such an intemperate conversational partner, that, by the end, Socrates is reduced to performing both sides of the discussion. Calicles refuses to speak, and Socrates both asks the questions and answers them. As you might expect, Socrates finds himself to be remarkably cooperative. With this memorable scene, I believe Plato is drawing our attention not just to the impossibility of reasoning with a radical hedonist like Calicles, but also the limitations of Socrates and his art of refutation. Socrates can get no purchase with Calicles because he and Calicles share no common ground. Whereas Polis was ready to admit, out of shame or genuine conviction, that justice is good and injustice bad, Calicles is loathe to concede any premise that Socrates could use to refute him. When he does make such a concession, he invariably takes it back later in the argument. No doubt Plato expects us to prefer the Socratic life of virtue to the Caliklean life of unrestrained hedonism, but Plato also worries that it could be difficult, or impossible, to refute a consistent immoralist. Socrates fails to land a knockout blow in this bout with the arch-immoralist Calicles, but is this failure due to his limitations as a moral teacher, or is something lacking on the part of Calicles, the intended student? This issue will arise again as we turn to an even more famous dialogue and inquiry into the nature of learning itself. In Plato's Meno, we will meet another disciple of Gorgias and make the surprising discovery that what seems to be learning is actually recollecting what we knew before we were even born. So, please remember to tune in for the Meno, next week on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.