Plato’s Gorgias

Week 2: A Preliminary Pass through the Dialogue

The occasion and background of the dialogue

The setting is the end of a speech that Gorgias has been giving as a demonstration; he has invited questions, and Socrates apparently shows up at this point, without having heard the speech itself. He proposes to question Gorgias, and Gorgias, perhaps unaware of Socrates’s reputation, willingly agrees to field whatever questions Socrates might throw at him.

How to anatomize the dialogue

The easiest way to divide the discussion is to break it down according to the three chief interlocutors; each brings with himself a distinct approach to the discussion and analysis of the problem. There may be other ways, and there are certainly thematic through-lines, so to speak, that would afford a different approach to the problem, but dividing it into the three distinct portions and their distinct approaches and patterns of diction will give us quite a lot to chew on as it is.

Gorgias’s Segment

Socrates initally asks just what it is that Gorgias does. The sophist replies with a shower of laudatory predicates (“Why, it's the best thing ever!” without coming down to the pedestrian but essential point that Socrates is striving for. He takes several different stabs at answering Socrates, but ultimately does not satisfy him. While Gorgias appears to be willing to go on, his friend Polus (whose name means “colt”) steps in, as if to protect him from bullying by Socrates.

Polus’s Segment

Polus’s intervention reframes the discussion somewhat, and allows him to press the case for why persuasion is both desirable and necessary for a civilized society.

Callicles’s Segment

Callicles comes to the defense in his turn, but he soon grows impatient and sour about something he had thought would be easy to win; when he sees that it will not be so, he begins to abuse Socrates for even concerning himself with this kind of silly stuff. He eventually turns surly and remarkably passive-aggressive before the dialogue is over.

For discussion:

• Is the approach that Socrates takes with Gorgias legitimate and valid? His querying of the "what is it?" point we find in the earlier (mostly aporetic) dialogues seems not to carry as much weight as it might.
• How is Polus’s approach different from Gorgias’ own?
• How does Callicles change the discourse? Have you run into people who try to win a contest by deprecating the terms of the discussion overall?
• Is Callicles finally defeated, or is he bullied into submission, or does his dodge into the meta-discursive shell really constitute a reframing of the discussion in such a way as to make it into a kind of aporia (one of process more than of philosophical substance) itself?