Plato’s Gorgias

Week 4: Gorgias Himself (447a-461b)

If you haven’t had a chance to do so already, read Gorgias’s Encomium to Helen. It’s found here, and is not more than a few pages. It is considered the locus classicus — the conventional topical account — of the Sophistic agenda, and especially for the ascendency of rhetoric over dialectic or logic. It may not fairly represent the breadth of Sophistical opinion, but it does at least give us some reference points that we can discuss.

It’s worth taking apart the arguments and claims Gorgias makes here to sift them for anything of value. Some of his responses are, in modern terms, “rookie mistakes” in argumentation — supplying an accidental or evaluative predicate (“the best thing ever”) for a request for an essential definition (“what is it?”)

For discussion:

• Is there an intrinsic morality implicit in the instrumentality itself? Does the teaching of rhetoric (or any other art or skill that can be used for morally diverse purposes) entail a problematic obligation to anticipate the consequences of how it is used? The notion that the medium can affect or constrict the message is not new: Marshall McLuhan famously articulated it in the 1962 book entitled Understanding Media as “The medium is the message”; Neil Postman in 1985 published Amusing Ourselves to Death, which examines the implications of reducing our political and social discourse to a form of entertainment by squeezing it through the limits of television in particular. How similar is Postman’ complaint to what Socrates saw in the entertainment of popular oratory?
• We can map these questions to some points of contemporary discourse:
  • What about guns? We hear from one side that guns ought to be categorically banned or strongly restricted. From the other we hear that it’s not the guns that are themselves killing people. Is either of these answers wholly clear and sufficient?
  • How about artificial intelligence — one of today’s hot-button issues? Is the use of AI sufficiently diffuse and ungovernable that it should be reined in and restricted by either law or custom, or should it be allowed to propagate and expand its own reach without regulation? How much degradation of our discourse are we willing to tolerate in the interest of allowing freedom of expression to a machine?
• Gorgias seems to leave room for (and indeed to valorize) some kind of persuasive compulsion against the will of the person being persuaded. Is this valid? Can you really be persuaded against your will of the truth of something? Can you be persuaded to do something even if you know it’s wrong, without it really accruing to your own moral account? Gorgias seems to claim that you can; certainly Judeo-Christian teaching about morality and behavioral accountability (from the scriptures on through the whole of the Christian tradition, both in the East and the West) does not accept that. What do you think? Is temptation ever wholly overwhelming, in other words — and if so, does it remain in the moral universe of the person succumbing to it?
• Do these discussions of Plato have other direct contemporary relevance on living a moral and acceptable life?