Remarks on the Gorgias: Can Reason Persuade? Socrates, Oratory and Self-Deceit.
In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates is portrayed in dialogue with men influenced by the Sophistic teaching of oratory. These men have concluded that the first political art is the art of persuasion by means of language (never clearly distinguished from force or fraud) and that techniques of such persuasion applicable to any subject matter can be developed and taught. Broad conclusions about the nature of a desirable human life are implied: e.g., that the best life is one which garners the most power of the sort that the ability to persuade confers, the power to impose one’s will. One implication specific to language is that the more persuasive argument is always the better argument, and that a persuasive argument is one that actually persuades. From an initial ethical relativism, then, a relativism of reason follows: what is good or reasonable is what is accepted as such.[1]
One of Socrates’ first questions to Gorgias is whether these techniques of persuasion work universally or only in the company of those who are ignorant about the subject. Gorgias admits that it is only in the company of the ignorant that his techniques work. But this is hardly enough to dismay the students of oratory since the “many” (the demos) is the source of political power and the demos will never be expert but ignorant. Thus, techniques of persuasion will always give power.
The Socratic response is, very generally speaking, that a good life is concerned not with what is apparently good but with what is really good, and that oratory is, by its nature, concerned only with appearances. It follows that oratory is no part of a good life.
Throughout the Platonic dialogues, the political is equated with the psychological. That is, it is assumed that for every political phenomenon, there is a psychological one that is its origin and reflex. On the Socratic analysis of oratory, oratory is revealed to be the political expression of the psychological phenomenon of self-deception. Self-deception is concerned with the manipulation of appearances for the sake of a hidden agenda. Likewise, oratory: it is the polis lying to itself as self-deception is the individual person lying to himself. By implication, every citizen taken in by an orator is complicit, for a political lie must have its sustaining personal dishonesty.
The model of reason to which Socrates contrasts oratory is craft (techné), one example of which is medicine. A techné combines theoretical principles with practical application to promote the good of its object independently of the welfare of its practitioner. Socrates argues that the true political art is justice (diké), which, he argues, is a techné that aims at the public good and not at the empowerment or enrichment of its practitioners. Oratory, he says, is the counterfeit of justice, taking its appearance without its essential concern.
One of the most provocative questions raised by the Gorgias is whether justice is a techné. Because of its theoretical organization, a techné can be taught. But Plato argues elsewhere (in the Meno) that justice cannot be taught. If it were teachable, then good parents would never have bad children.
Practical wisdom is clearly not just one techné on par with others. Piloting, medicine, and practical wisdom are not commensurable. I suggest that the knowledge that is virtue is in some respects like medicine, in that it is principled and aims at the good of its object (which goodness Socrates conceived as the inculcation of its natural ordering), and thus is practical knowledge, as any techné. It is this crucial feature of wisdom that Socrates seeks to highlight in the Gorgias.
In other respects wisdom is not like an ordinary techné. I have two differences in mind. First, the knowledge that is virtue essentially involves humility; a virtuous person, that is, maintains an effective awareness of the ineluctable finitude of his knowledge of virtue (i.e., a practical knowledge of his ignorance). That is to say, he is aware that he can never have a theoretically complete knowledge of virtue (since he can never have a completed knowledge of himself). This awareness of the theoretical incompleteness of one’s self-knowledge makes possible the sensitivity and openness necessary for accurate practical judgment. Theoretical self-certainty about virtue makes for dogmatism, conceit, and practical blundering.
The second difference is that whereas a techné such as medicine is a techné the practice of which one can intermittently take up and quit, wisdom is not so voluntary. Practical wisdom, you might say, is the techné the practice of which is being a human being. The discipline of this techné is unrelenting and its failure results in a diminishing of one’s humanity. It’s as if you are a work of art (a sculpture, say) to which every action and project of yours contributes in some way. Your aim is to bring out the excellence or beauty of this work by being true to its nature. You are not the arbitrary or tyrannical creator of this work (which is yourself), for its material possesses a prior integrity or nature that you must respect and to which you must respond if you are to render the beauty that is possible for it.
In short, the techné that is wisdom is forced. Like it or not, you are always in the process of making/sculpting yourself; every choice and act has its effect. But since you are at one and the same time the craftsman and the craft object, you cannot stand away from this project. It is thus not the sort of knowledge that can come into your deliberate and arbitrary control and it cannot be retained intact over lapses of practice.
It is this lack of objective control over practical wisdom that makes it unteachable. We all remain constant students of this certain techné; none of us can truly claim full mastery. Thus, since none of us is an authority on the question of wisdom (as some of us are in the other crafts), our appropriate role is one of friendship, by which we promote wisdom in ourselves and others simultaneously. Friendship involves virtues of honesty and truthfulness that are the very antithesis of self-deceit. Friendship in the community leaves no room for oratory.
The question of whether reason can persuade is relevant to politics as well as psychology. Increasingly, it seems, our public policy, to the extent that it is influenced by public opinion, is shaped by those who employ the best professional persuaders, i.e., people who specialize in generally applicable techniques of persuasion. The thought I wish to provoke is whether there is a voice of reason that has its own force beyond the techniques of professional persuasion, of salesmanship. This is the question raised in Plato’s Gorgias, and I take the Gorgias as my text.
Let me articulate here some Platonic doctrine about the meaning of terms such as ‘wisdom’, ‘virtue’, and ‘justice’. On the Platonic view, everyone, simply because he is a human being, wants to lead a good life. As this is sometimes put, everyone wants to be happy. Our ‘happiness’ translates, with misfortune, the Greek ‘eudaimonia’. A closer English translation is ‘flourishing’. Eudaimonia denotes the fulfillment of human potential to the point of excellence, where this potential is not simply natural but mediated and transformed by culture.[2] The opposite of eudaimonia is dysdaimonia, denoting division or strife of the soul; thus, eudaimonia carries the connotation of spiritual unity. Virtue is needed for happiness; our ‘virtue’, with its Hebraic-Christian overlay, translates with equal misfortune the Greek ‘areté’, which denotes, generally or specifically, excellence in the fulfillment of potential. Thus, the cultivation of areté was considered necessary for eudaimonia.
An example of a specific non-moral virtue is musicality. Developing a natural talent for music, a person may then acquire an excellence in the performance of music, and thus may be said to have acquired a musical virtue. Not everyone has musical talent, but certain virtues were generally considered in Greek moral thought to be necessary for anyone who would lead a good life. These were the cardinal moral virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and prudence. Socrates argues elsewhere that these four virtues are actually four aspects of a single virtue, which may be termed “practical wisdom” (so that courage necessarily involves prudence, etc.). Socrates shares with his interlocutors the assumption that a wise person is virtuous and is thereby, in the active personal realization in which virtue consists, in possession of a good and happy life. It’s worth noting that the Greek idea of goodness carries an aesthetic connotation, so that what is good is beautiful and admirable in the way that all beautiful things are, stirring a mix of admiration and desire.
One of the central questions in the Gorgias is whether justice, understood in the usual way as fairness, and temperance, understood as self-control, are really virtues. At one point, Callicles tries to re-define justice with a speech about “natural justice,” according to which it is by nature that the stronger should dominate and lord it over the weaker. He ridicules justice and temperance, as usually conceived, as burdens of the weak who do not have the enterprise to fulfill their desires or the power to forestall retaliation.
Due to the truth of the thesis of the ultimate identity of the political with the psychological argued by Plato through several dialogues (notably in the Republic), the question broached at the top of the previous page about public life ramifies to a question about the nature of the individual human soul. Viz., is it at least possible that there be among my own deliberations and decisions—the formulation of personal policy—a motivation from reason that is distinct from, and not just a scheduling of, the motivations of compulsion, desire, fond hope, quiet desperation, personal or family myths, likely stories, etc.? Socrates argued in the affirmative; his sophistic interlocutors implicitly subscribe to the negative.
Plato’s Gorgias attempts to present ideas as they really are: embodied in human speech and character. In the dialogue, a certain man named Polus takes up the dialogue with Socrates after the opening conversation with Gorgias comes to an impasse. The ideas that Polus represents cannot really be understood without understanding who Polus is. He is an ambitious young man who has promising career prospects and who has taken as his ideal of success those who have gathered enough political and economic power to do, as he sees it, exactly as they please. The wherewithal to fulfill arbitrary preference is, for Polus, the mark of a successful, i.e., a good, life. He therefore holds Archelaus, the tyrant of Macedonia who overthrew the Macedonian king by stealth and systematically murdered all of the legitimate heirs, as an example of someone who is truly successful since Archelaus holds absolute and unrivaled power in his country. Because of his absolute power, Archelaus suffers from none of the repression of desire that counts as temperance in the lives of most of the rest of us.
Polus longs not for human solidarity, but to set himself apart from the rest of humanity. Typically of such men, he conceives of himself as somehow special and deservedly exempt from the frailties and fate of ordinary people. Implicit in his view is a theme that another character in the dialogue, Callicles, later makes explicit: that the cunning and strong owe it to themselves to take a larger share of what life has to offer, contrary to that conventional notion of justice that insists on fairness and which is the trick that the many weak try to play on the superior few to get them to rein in their natural strength. In short, it is, ultimately and naturally, might that makes right, power that makes for goodness.
Perhaps I have said enough to indicate Polus’ character. Polus is, of course, only a literary character. Yet he exemplifies a sort or type of man well known to ancient Athens and modern Hartford. In the dynamic of his character, reason has no guiding role to play; the moving force of all decision and action is desire, and the only role for intelligence is the acquisition of means for the cultivation and fulfillment of desire. For Polus, reason is a slave of the passions.
At the beginning of the Gorgias, Socrates has come to find out from Gorgias what sort of art Gorgias teaches. Polus and the others admire Gorgias because he professes to teach them the skills needed to persuade assemblies and so to advance themselves in their political careers. When Socrates asks Gorgias what sort of art he teaches, Gorgias answers that he teaches oratory. “What is oratory?” Socrates asks. “It is the noblest art of all,” says Gorgias, “for as a master of this art, one can give a convincing answer to any question whatever.”
This valorizing description of oratory is hardly the informative definition that Socrates was seeking. As Socrates questions Gorgias and begins to make progress toward the essence of the idea of oratory, Gorgias admits that such an “art” will work only in the company of the ignorant, since knowledge has a steadfastness about it and cannot be persuaded to just any conclusion, the way ignorance can.
At this point, an indignant Polus asks Socrates what sort of art he thinks oratory is. Socrates replies that he does not think oratory is an art at all but merely a sort of “knack.” The word translated into ‘art’ here is techné. Socrates’ intent is to contrast Gorgias’ sort of business as professional persuader, on the one hand, with a discipline that is clearly rational and which will therefore serve as a model of practical reason, on the other. As mentioned before, a techné combines theoretical principles with practical application to serve the good of its object. Ship piloting is one of Socrates’ examples; medicine is another. The purpose of the art of piloting is to apply theoretical knowledge of sea, sky, and ship to the particular task of preserving cargo and passengers across a journey. The success of this application is the success of reason. But note that reason in this case does not serve the pilot’s interests, but the passengers’. That is why the passengers typically have to pay the pilot. The practice of the art itself does not serve the practitioner’s good, but the good of its object. Likewise for medicine and all other arts. The implication is that it is characteristic of a reasoned practice to aim at a good that is independent of its practitioner’s personal and prior interests.
But for each real techné, Socrates notes, there is a counterfeit that takes the art’s appearance but is really concerned not with the good of its object but with its practitioner’s personal and pre-conceived interests. Such counterfeits therefore always serve ulterior interests. The success of such a counterfeit depends not on reason but on a certain cunning that shrewdly assesses its audience’s disposition. This success is the success of flattery, and Socrates calls it a “knack.” It is merely a knack because it has no theoretical component; it is all practice and, since unprincipled, cannot give an account (logos) of itself.
The success of such a knack requires that its audience be sufficiently hedonistic that they confuse goodness with pleasure and are then inclined to act for the sake of pleasure rather than for the sake of the good. The knack that is oratory plays to the pleasure of its audience through flattery and appeal to prejudice, greed, fear, etc. Oratory is essentially manipulative and so requires some unaccounted flair for playing on the psychological makeup of its audience.
For Polus’ instruction, Socrates lists four technés, two of the body and two of the soul. For the body, he lists medicine and gymnastics. For the soul, he lists justice and legislation. Each of these aims at the good of the body or the soul (of the individual or of the community). Oratory, he says, is the counterfeit of justice, using language to persuade about questions of justice (right and wrong, good and evil) when its real concerns are elsewhere. The counterfeit of legislation is what he calls sophistry; “pork-barrel” legislation is an example of sophistry, as any general policy, personal or public, that is skewed by special interests.
The counterfeit of gymnastic, he says, is cosmetics since it promotes the appearance of health without concern for its reality. And the counterfeit of medicine is pastry-cooking, since medicine is concerned with what you take into your body that promotes health (medicine and nutritional food), while pastry-cooking is concerned merely with the pleasure of taste for the sake of the pastry cook’s profit, and disregards the welfare of the body. In general, the moral distinction between pleasure and goodness corresponds to a metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality. (There is some hint here of the Buddhist idea that adopting pleasure and pain as standards of value creates a world of addictive illusion.)
[1] Analogously, the stronger force is the force that actually prevails. The power of logos (speech and, by extension, thought) is conceived as instrumental for one’s prior purposes.
[2] A eudaimonic person is, literally, “watched over by a good spirit.” Originally and in ordinary talk, eudaimonia was just a matter of doing well, of having the good fortune to prosper. The philosophers noted: (1) that ordinary prosperity does not of itself make a good person or a good life; and (2) that such prosperity anyway depends too much on luck for it to be a worthy goal of one’s actions. The thought was that the goodness of one’s life should be, to a reasonable extent, under some rational control and not subject to the fortunes that bring material prosperity and take it away. Thus the way was opened to refine the notion of eudaimonia by asking what a eudaimonic life might be apart from ordinary prosperity.