Plato’s Gorgias (wikipedia)
Socrates continues to argue that rhetoric is not an art, but merely a knack: “…it guesses at what’s pleasant with no consideration for what’s best.
.. The effect of the ‘proof’ is not to persuade, but to disorient him
.. Socrates believes that rhetoric alone is not a moral endeavor. Gorgias is criticized because, “he would teach anyone who came to him wanting to learn oratory but without expertise in what’s just…” (482d). Socrates believes that people need philosophy to teach them what is right, and that oratory cannot be righteous without philosophy.
.. Socrates continually claims that his methods of questioning are aimed at discovering the truth.
.. At the same time, truth is not based upon commonly accepted beliefs. Socrates outlines a problem about truth when it is misaligned from public opinion: “you don’t compel me; instead you produce many false witnesses against me and try to banish me from my property, the truth. For my part, if I don’t produce you as a single witness to agree with what I’m saying, then I suppose I’ve achieved nothing worth mentioning concerning the things we’ve been discussing
.. Gorgias admits under Socrates’ cross-examination that while rhetoricians give people the power of words, they are not instructors of morality. Gorgias does not deny that his students might use their skills for immoral purposes (such as persuading the assembly to make an unwise decision, or to let a guilty man go free), but he says the teacher cannot be held responsible for this.
.. Socrates says that he is one of those people who is actually happy to be refuted if he is wrong. He says that he would rather be refuted than to refute someone else because it is better to be delivered from harm oneself than to deliver someone else from harm.
.. Socrates gets Gorgias to agree that the rhetorician is actually more convincing in front of an ignorant audience than an expert, because mastery of the tools of persuasion gives a man more conviction than mere facts.
.. Some have argued that Gorgias may have been uncharacteristically portrayed by Plato, because “…Plato’s Gorgias agrees to the binary opposition knowledge vs. opinion” (82).[3] This is inaccurate because, “for Gorgias the sophist, all ‘knowledge’ is opinion. There can be no rational or irrational arguments because all human beliefs and communicative situations are relative to a kairotic moment” (83).[3]
.. Socrates states that it is far worse to inflict evil than to be the innocent victim of it
.. Socrates argues that just penalties discipline people, make them more just, and cure them of their evil ways (478d). Wrongdoing is second among evils, but wrongdoing and getting away with it is the first and greatest of evils (479d). It follows from this, that if a man does not want to have a festering and incurable tumor growing in his soul, he needs to hurry himself to a judge upon realizing that he has done something wrong.
.. Callicles observes that if Socrates is correct, people have life upside down, and are everywhere doing the opposite of what they should be doing.
.. He further argues (as Glaucon does in the Gyges story in the Republic) that wrongdoing is only by convention shameful, and it is not wrong by nature.
.. Callicles then returns to his defense of nature’s own justice, where the strong exercise their advantages over the weak. He states that the natural man has large appetites and the means to satisfy them, and that only a weakling praises temperance and justice based on artificial law not natural.
.. Socrates argues that he aims at what is best, not at what is pleasant ..
He says that he enjoins people to take the bitter draughts, and compels them to hunger and thirst, while most politicians flatter the people with sweetmeats
.. He says of his trial that, “I shall be judged like a doctor brought before a jury of children with a cook as prosecutor” (521e). He says that such a pandering prosecutor will no doubt succeed in getting him sentenced to death, and he will be helpless to stop it. Socrates says that all that matters is his own purity of soul; he has maintained this, and it is the only thing that is really within his power (522d).