Plato’s Gorgias

Week 3: Persuasion, the Art of Rhetoric, and the Sophists

Who were the Sophists?

The Sophists were not a closely organized movement or confederation of philosophers or teachers; the label was generally applied to the teachers of the rhetorical arts that flourished about this time in Athens and some of the other Greek city-states. Their general claim — as especially exemplified in Gorgias’s contention — was that they could teach people how to win arguments of most sorts, especially in the public arena where people had to give speeches to win adherence to their causes. From the Socratic dialogues, in which several Sophists figured prominently (this and the Protagoras being perhaps the most important), there has been a general bias against Sophists on and off for the last two thousand years or so. “Sophist” is in fact used in some contexts to denote a pettifogging nit-picker who confuses people with their fancy words (and indeed, “rhetoric” has likewise been used with a similar implication). This is arguably not fair to the overall work of rhetoric, but we can discuss here how much or how little that reputation was deserved or how well Socrates dealt with the reality behind the label.

A recent book by Richard McKirahan of Pomona College (the alma mater of both of us — Karl Oles and Bruce McMenomy) entitled simply The Sophists, takes a thoughtful look behind the label and fills the picture out somewhat. It can be found at Amazon here.

Socrates’s skepticism about the whole process

Socrates was famously ill at ease with rhetoric and the arts of public speaking; he thought that truth was most likely to emerge through the process of dialectic — which is to say, the back-and-forth of conversation. The abillity to ask questions (in both directions) would, he believed, provide the best chance of achieving clarity of thought. When this presupposes a likeness of purpose, it is hard to think that he is mistaken; where the purposes of both parties to a discussion or debate diverge, it may well be less than successful at achieving the desired concord. Certainly in this dialogue we have an example (Callicles in the third section) of an interlocutor who disagrees with Socrates not only in substance but also in manner and approach. He considers the whole proces beneath contempt, and steps frequently outside the frame of discourse to abuse Socates for even bothering to talk about this stuff. Whether this effectively breaks the underlying dynamic of discourse, or whether something still survives, is a topic we will take up later in the course.

The other question, which Socrates effectively never answers, is whether public debate in the form of back-and-forth oratorical contests is, by virtue of being less perfect than dialectic, altogether vitiated. Is there any place for oratory in the philosophical and for genuinely thoughtful people who are disagreeing. Many of those who deride the Sophists today do so while exploiting their oratorical tools, in the context of political speeches. One wonders whether there’s a hidden agenda there. Whether the persuasive force of dialectic is — entirely by virtue of its medium — wholly disjunct from that of oratory is also a valid question.

In a recent article in The Atlantic (“The Era of Rational Discourse is Over”, May 3, 2026), Adam Kirsch writes about the late Jürgen Habermas, who argued that “the essence of democracy was thoughtful back-and-forth argument.” Basing the observation on a broader generalization, he notes:

But in every case, Habermas wrote, “the speech act of one person succeeds only if the other accepts the offer contained in it.” And the decision to accept or reject a speech act is always “based on potential grounds or reasons.” Whenever we say something, we are making a tacit promise that we have good reasons for saying it, and could produce them if called on to do so. Habermas concluded that persuasion isn’t just one way of using language among many others; it is the foundation of every use of language. “The inherent telos of human speech,” the purpose for which it is intended, is “reaching understanding” between human beings.

In real life, of course, we don’t use language only for rational persuasion. We also use it to give orders and make threats, demanding obedience instead of agreement. But when we agree with someone because of the potential “losses” or “rewards,” Habermas argued, we aren’t truly agreeing, just giving in. By the same principle, public discourse is authentic only when no participant is excluded, no opinion is forbidden, and no one is subjected to coercion. These conditions are seldom found in real politics, but we can always get closer to the ideal or further from it.

If Habermas is right here, then the boundaries Socrates is setting up may be (at least) porous or (at most) artificial. If a case is to be made that all speech is essentially persuasive in some respect, then certainly the only possible alternative to persuasive speech is silence. This is arguably not what Socrates (the perpetual chatterbox and gadfly) had in mind, but we may need to narrow the definition of “persuasive speech” that we are talking about. In such a context, is the giving of one-to-many speeches intrinsically different from dialectic in an absolute sense, or is it merely a distinction in degree and (perhaps) purpose?

For discussion:

• Is Socrates’s initial challenge (“What is it that you teach?”) a legitimate query, or is it sufficiently ambiguous that Gorgias’ asymmetrical response is only to be expected? Is Socrates making or failing to make important distinctions in the fabric of what he is talking about? Is Gorgias?
• What does Gorgias do? Is his (claimed) techne — informed art — of persuasion an exhaustive coverage of the whole domain? How does it line up with, for example, Aristotle’s dialectic and logical tools such as we find in the Categories, On Interpretation, and the Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics? Aristotle’s tools are at least ostensibly designed to be intellectually compelling (which is to say, persuasive in accord with the truth of the propositions themselves). Is Gorgias doing anything like this?