In Our Time - Plato's Gorgias

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Plato's most striking dialogues, in which he addresses the real nature of power and freedom, and the relationship between pleasure and true self-interest. As he tests these ideas, Plato creates powerful speeches, notably from Callicles who claims that laws of nature trump man-made laws, that might is right, and that rules are made by weak people to constrain the strong in defiance of what is natural and proper. Gorgias is arguably the most personal of all of Plato's dialogues, with its hints of a simmering fury at the system in Athens that put his mentor Socrates to death, and where rhetoric held too much sway over people. WithAngie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldFrisbee Sheffield University Lecturer in Classics and Fellow of Downing College, University of CambridgeAndFiona Leigh Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, Plato's Gorgias is one of his most striking dialogues, addressing the real nature of power and freedom, and the relationship between pleasure and true self-interest.

To test these ideas, Plato creates some extraordinarily powerful speeches, notably from Calicles, who claims that laws of nature trump man-made laws that might is right and rules are for the little people. This is arguably the most personal of all Plato's dialogues with hints of a simmering rage of the system that put his beloved Socrates to death, and where rhetoric held too much sway. When we're to discuss Plato's gorgeous, our Fiona Lee, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University College London, Frisby Sheffield, University Lecture in Classics and fellow of Downing College University of Cambridge,

and Angie Hobbes, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Angie Hobbes, what do we need to know about Plato's life before he wrote this work? He was born into an aristocratic Athenian family, about 47 BCE, and was expected to have a political career. However, as a young man, he developed an interest in philosophy

and became an associate of Socrates. and when Socrates was put to death by the Athenian democracy in 399, Plato seems to have left Athens in grief and disgust. He was also revolted by the brutal excesses of the oligarchic faction. He travelled extensively around the Greek world and perhaps further afield for about 10 years. And really importantly for our discussion, in 387, he made his first trip to southern Italy to study mathematics and harmonics with the Pythagorean communities there. He seems to have been particularly influenced by their notion of geometric proportion,

which figures prominently in the Gorgias. The idea is that the cosmos is an order whole bound together by mathematical laws. And on this same trip, he also visited Sicily and had very uncomfortable dealings with the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius I. So he's getting first-hand experience of tyranny, which again is reflected in the Gorge, yes. And it's on his return to Athens after this trip that he finally, now in his late 30s, appears to have made the decision to devote his life to philosophy full-time. Was Plato's decision to drop what he was doing and devote himself full-time to philosophy

occasioned by him seeing and listening to Socrates? I'm sure that was hugely important to him. I mean, unlike Socrates, he decides to write as well. Socrates, of course, never wrote anything down, claiming he didn't have enough knowledge to write. But Plato does take up this life of research, of writing, of teaching in the academy. And yes, Socrates is a key figure there.

And he's devoting his life full-time to philosophy. he's decided not to go into politics at all. And I think it's at this critical turning point in his life, in his late 30s that he writes the Gorgias. So it's not just part of his lifelong defence of Socrates. It's also, in my view, his own very personal, passionate, at times angry defence of his own choice of life. And hence all the references in the dialogue to the fundamental questions,

question, how should one live? What would the name Gorgias mean to the first readers of this dialogue? Well, Gorgias was a very well-known and well-respected teacher and practitioner of rhetoric from Leonty and Sicily, about 20 miles from Syracuse. He travelled around the Greek world and taught young men for pretty considerable sums of money. The rhetorical skills they would need to get on in public life. in the law courts, in the assemblies and public meetings, particularly important, of course, in a democracy. He also gave flamboyant oratorical displays. He was famous for all his rhetorical flourishes, metaphor and rhyme and assonance and so on.

And he also used his skills in political affairs, such as his embassy from Leonty to Athens in 427. We tend to distinguish practicing orators from teachers of rhetoric, but in Greek it's the same word, Rhetor. And Gorgias, perhaps not surprisingly, has a very high opinion of the work of Rhetors. And in one of his own writings, he claims that rhetoric can enchant, persuade and change the souls of men. I mean, he has a very, he does have a high opinion of himself. It's a wonderful story. We don't know for sure if it's true

that he dedicates a gold statue of himself to Apollo at Delphi. So he's, yes, he's a legend in his own eyes at any rate. Fiona Lee, what broadly was Plato interested in across his philosophy? It's a big, big question. But Till, could you give it a go? Plato's philosophical interests were extremely broad.

They spanned all the subfields in philosophy that we teach in universities today. But I'll just mention three. The biggest and most central enduring area of interest for him was ethics. So ethical questions, which for him were closely related to political questions, preoccupied him, questions about how we ought to live and how we ought to treat other people, and above all, what kind of people we ought to become. So we see in the dialogues, his main character was Socrates asking questions from the early

dialogues on such as what is the virtue justice, a question central to the gorgeous, but also what is courage and so on. Socrates himself claimed not to know the answers to any of these questions, but he insisted and Plato's other characters also intimate that acquiring virtue is central for the good life. As a result, scholars have thought that Plato's interest in ethics reflected his belief that ethical virtues with these real determinate properties, their objective things, such that there's just one way to become a just person or a courageous person, and there's just one correct way to live in order to flourish and be happy. So that's ethics.

The second area of interest that's probably relevant to this dialogue is the question of epistemology, questions around the difference between knowledge, say, and belief. Questions about what it is that warrants thinking a claim is true, what counts as good evidence or a good reason and what doesn't. And the third area of interest that has to be mentioned in connection with Plato, I think, is his metaphysical interest, and in particular his postulation of these entities he called forms. These are completely abstract objects that corresponded to the,

The sorts of things Socrates, particularly in the early dialogues, was always asking about. So there was a form of justice, for example. Was this like ideal? When he's talking about forms, it's like an ideal of? Yes, it is exactly like an idea, but with one important difference. So the form of justice isn't our concept or idea of justice. Plato thought the form of justice was this sort of abstract, purely intelligible thing or object. And being intelligible, it's not physical. It's something that we can only access with our minds.

And what we're doing when we understand what justice really is, we grasp the true definition of justice, what we're doing is with our minds getting in contact with this really existing intelligible object. It's there for us to understand. And most importantly, for Plato, grasping and having proper knowledge of forms gives us the ability, the power to transform our souls

so that we can become just, or become courageous, become virtuous, and live a happy life. He thinks that these three things, ethics, knowledge, and in the end, the metaphysical entities he called forms, are the key to a good life. Why was Plato drawn to dialogues in his books rather than a long treatise or a monologue? So we have to speculate about this because Plato doesn't tell us,

but we can speculate that he did so for several reasons. There was never a part written for himself in these long philosophical conversations. And many people think that this is because he didn't want to tell people what to think. You know, he wanted people to reflect on these ideas and come to their own conclusions. So that's one plausible reason. Another reason that he probably wrote dialogues, or so I think, is that it gives him the ability to model what a good philosophical discussion looks like, involving the giving and taking of reasons on questions that people are interested in or people think are

important and then talking about those reasons, you know, submitting them to critical scrutiny. And also the dialogue form allows him to model what bad conversations, bad philosophical conversations look like when people don't listen to each other or give and take reasons. Can I move to Frisbury Sheffield now? This work opens with Socrates at the House of Calicles, where he wants to talk to Gordius and ask him about rhetoric. What to Gordius is rhetoric for? Well, Gordius flanders around a bit here. So even though he's supposedly a stellar practitioner, as Angie's already mentioned.

So he starts off by saying that it's the ability to persuade a jury in the council or assembly or any other public gathering. But this doesn't really make it clear what it's about or what it's for, but those contexts suggest that it concerns the sorts of issues that were discussed in those contexts, i.e. questions about right and wrong and justice. Those are the sorts of things that were deliberated in the council and the assembly. So it might seem at that point that Wetterick is for the purposes of justice, but Gorgias is really hard to pin down on that point. And what emerges as the discussion goes on is that,

Whether or not its subject matter is justice, it's used by people like Gorgias for the acquisition of power by the Speaker. So Gorgias claims at one point that rhetoric seeks freedom for oneself and control over others. It enables others to be enslaved to the Speaker. And power and rhetoric were already in some sense entwined in the popular imagination, in as much as political success and power in a democracy dependent, depended on the ability to persuade the Demos, the people. And this view comes into sharper and sort of more sinister focus as the dialogue goes on. So it's used for the acquisition of power either by allowing the speaker to impose their

will on others, as Polis is later to put it, or by enabling the speaker to pursue their desires, as Callicles puts it. So it's really about power. And Plato challenges the fundamental use and overall. authenticity of rhetoric? Yes, that's right. I mean, rhetoric was not a clearly defined term before the Gorgias. There wasn't a sort of discrete body of teachings that were agreed to constitute the rhetorical

art. So what retortals like Gorgias aimed to teach was sort of broad and amorphous and its exponents claim to equip a young man for life and politics. So Plato evidently thought it was in need of definitional constraint. And on top of that, philosophy pre-Plateo wasn't a distinctive discipline. So Plato is at once sort of delimiting arrivals to reign in a way and defining his own discursive practice by showing that it had greater legitimacy. But then added to that, we get the sort of animosity here towards rhetoric,

which seems to have quite a lot to do with Socrates's trial and death, something of which we've got constant reminders in this work. Can you give us a reminder here? Can you give them the listeners a reminder? Yes, so there's one point when Callicles says, Socrates, if someone were to seize you and take you to court on some trumped-up charge, you'd stand there gaping and have nothing to say.

And if they wanted to put you to death, they'd get away with it, which is, of course, precisely what happened. So Plato seems here to contextualise this discussion within thinking about Socrates's trial and death, and he seems to be taking issue with the way in which, democratic culture foster practices of speech in which the truth just can't emerge, because it relies on pandering to a large crowd so that one can gain their vote and thereby gain power for oneself, as these speakers suppose. And in those conditions, a speaker's reduced to gratifying

the majority not seeking the truth, and so just men like Socrates get put to death. So practices of speech really becomes central to Plato's analysis of this episode, and the stakes couldn't be higher. And it's an audacious thing to do in a city at the height of its civilisation, which in its ruling is dependent on rhetoric and those it admires are our retriticians on the highest order. Yes, quite. And Socrates' attacks not just Gorgias, but he brings in politicians like Pericles and Themistocles into his criticism. So it's... Heroes all. Yeah. Well, to some.

clearly not to Plato. So Plato is in that position there. Can we move back to Socrates? He argues that rhetoric is a knack rather than ours. Why does that matter so much? Socrates makes this distinction because in his view, rhetoric, as we've just been hearing from Frisbee, it doesn't require knowledge of its subject matter in order to be persuasive, particularly if the audience doesn't know much about the subject matter either. In Socrates's view, rhetoric aims not at truth and instruction, but at pleasure, it's a branch of flattery that seeks simply to gratify the immediate desires of the audience rather than seeking their overall good and this distinction between pleasure and gratification on the one hand and one's what's really best for you on the other is going to be

absolutely central to the whole work. And that's why it's potentially so dangerous. Socrates says it's like the knacks of cosmetics and cookery rather than the arts of gymnastic training and medicine. So he's pretty hostile to rhetoric in The Gorgeous. And as Frisbee suggested, I think that's partly driven by his anger at how he thinks rhetoric's been misused, particularly in the trial of Socrates. In later dialogues, in fact, like the Fidreus, he softens his view a bit and says that there could be a kind of philosophic rhetoric. And it might be possible to develop an ethical form of rhetoric. But in the Gordiase, he draws up the battle lines pretty starkly. Fiona, how does a discussion about rhetoric turn into one about the difference between right and wrong?

Each of Socrates' interlocutors has a go at saying what rhetoric is, but in doing so, whether they mean to or not, each of them explains what rhetoric is in ways that make it an ethically significant practice. So as Frisby was saying earlier, Gorgias says that teaching his students the practice of rhetoric is going to give them the ability or the power to persuade other people in law courts and the assemblies about matters of justice. and injustice, so about what's right and wrong for the city to do or for a jury to decide. Socrates seizes upon this. That's what he's interested in. And as we've heard, Gorgeous in the end doesn't really know what justice is, it seems. And he doesn't even think it's that bigger deal to be able to say what justice is or talk about it. Polis is the next person that Socrates talks to in the dialogue at length. And he too talks about rhetoric, tries to describe what it is and give an account of it. And he thinks it's a great power, which allows people to

do what they want, to get others to think and to do what they want through persuasion. And so the returition can get other people to do what they want. And it's this great good. It's instrumental, he thinks, for flourishing and happiness. And he admires people who have this power and think they're going to live the good life. So Polis connects rhetoric with key ethical question, in particular the ethical question of value or goodness, because he thinks it's in a person's best interests and key to the good life to be free to do what they want to act as they please and have power over other people, not the other way around.

So as soon as Polis focuses on this key ethical question of value and goodness, Socrates seizes on it, and he asks Paulus a bunch of questions. And in the end, through asking him, Many questions. He gets him to admit the opposite of what he said. He gets him to admit that a person with great power over others could, for example, be mistaken about what really is in their own interests. So in fact, despite all the power they have over other people, they're going to be powerless to get what they really want, to get what's really in their own interest. Frisby, what's the connection here between the way someone speaks and what really matters to them? What we see in the Gorgias is that character is not only revealed in what the speaker says. So, for example, what they appraise and endorse, but in how they say it. So it shows that there's a relationship, for example, between extended rhetorical speechmaking,

which shows no regard for truth and aims to dominate others, and an ethical outlook focused on power. And in a similar way, how Socrates talks to others very differently, by refuting and being refuted, that in turn is expressive of what matters to him seeking the truth rather than winning or losing. And that's manifested for Socrates in dialogue, which is collaborative and a cooperative truth-seeking endeavour, a joint search, as he sometimes puts it. And this practice embodies values in its very form. So, for example, dialogical relations are relations with domination and the short question and answer format embodies a kind of a quality between the

speakers and this is shown in their sharing of the discourse and their reciprocity in the back and forth of question and answer and this the sense of coming together for common purpose is an expression of friendship and community between participants so socrates is as much concerned here with what a speaker says as he is with how they say it because how we talk to one another matters, ethically speaking. There's an ethics of conversation built into the practice. It can be used to establish friendship and community between the participants, or it can be used, as rhetoric was by the speakers here, to assert oneself and dominate others. Frisbury, I mean, I just think that's absolutely right. And I, rereading the dialogue in

preparation for this discussion, I noticed, of course, as many have done, that the first word is Ponomos war. Calicles says, you know, you've come at the right time for a fight and a fray, Socrates. So for Calicles, discussion on these questions is going to be very combative. You know, can you defeat your opponent? The exact opposite of what you've just been telling us is Socrates is ideal. And then there's this idea that if your friends did wrong, you'd want them punished, while your enemies should go unpunished. What's Plato exploring there? The argument goes, so the most important thing for your well-being in this life and the next is the care of your soul. But wronging others is going to greatly damage your soul.

And it's much worse for you if you wrung others than if they wrong you. Because other people can only harm your body or material goods, they can't harm your soul. You are the only person who can harm your own soul by wrongdoing. And if you do happen to wrong somebody else, which of course is not ideal, but if you do, the best course of remedial action you can take is to ask to be punished, as this will partly cleanse your soul. And Socrates says that that would be a good use of your rhetorical skills to go along and plead to be punished. So if you put all that together, it follows that if any of your friends do wrong, you should use your rhetorical skills to get to. them punished too to help them purify their souls, which will be good for them in this life and

crucially the next as well. But if any of your enemies do wrong, you could perhaps use those same rhetorical skills to see that they go unpunished and un cleansed. I personally find that last move, to me, it's not very, it's not Socrates's finest moment and it doesn't really accord with what he says in other dialogues, which is that the good man should never do wrong. I think that that really speaks to Plato's anger, personal anger when he's writing this dialogue. After discussing with Georgios and Polar, Socrates is confronted by their host, Calicles. There's a dramatic change then. What is it, Fiona? So much changes when Calicles joins the conversation. One thing that's really striking to me about this dialogue and brought to a real

head with Calicles' involvement in the conversation is that there's a lot of talk about people knowing what other people think, even better than what other people know themselves of what they think. So just before Calicles enters the conversation, there's this striking exchange between Socrates and Polis where Socrates insists that he believes, he, Socrates believes and Polis believes, and everybody else believes, it's better to suffer injustice than to perpetrate injustice. And Polis, in reply, says that he doesn't believe that. And what's more, Paulus says, Socrates doesn't believe it either. So there's this kind of standoff earlier on in the dialogue before Calicles enters, where people insist they know what the other one thinks

better than they do themselves. So let's get Calicles point of view here. Calicles, when he enters, accuses both Polis and before him, Gorgias, of not saying what they really thought. So Calicles insists that Socrates is up to no good in tricking them and that the others were ashamed to say what they really thought. But he Calicles is prepared to say what he really thinks, so that's not going to happen to him. And here what we have is a clash then of the two ways of talking that Frisbee was mentioning before. So Socrates seems to be engaging a conversation really earnestly asking people what they believe, whereas Calicles is alleging he's doing what Calicles does,

he's having a fight, a war, and trying to get people to contradict themselves by any old means, not because they've discovered reasons for thinking something different. Frisbee, can we come back to a perhaps simple view in my view anyway, of Calicles? Calicles believes, and it's like a bombshell that comes in as far as I've read it, that might is right. that power is what people should seek, that it's the weak who want elections because they're

too weak to stand up for themselves, that we see this in nature too, because in nature the strong animals defeat the weak animals. That is put in as a very powerful statement. What do you make on that? It's a challenge to Socrates's entire world view. And it really does raise the question that Fiona addressed of what common ground can be found with someone whose entire outlook. is so opposed to one's own here. But, I mean, Socrates doesn't seem in the least shaken by that. He welcomes the challenge. He calls Socrates, Calicles rather, a touchstone of truth

just after his savage critique of Socrates's entire way of life. So evidently, Socrates sees divergence of opinion as an opportunity for further examination. But I mean, most of the rest of the dialogue, really, is Socrates's attempt to both question those beliefs that Callicles holds and to show Calicles that actually he holds views that can't really be justified in argument and then also to present a different kind of world view of his own. But it's particularly challenging with an interlocutor like Calicles, partly because it's not just that it's very difficult to find common ground with somebody whose ethical outlook is entirely at odds with one's own. But it's also that the governing structures of dialogue that I referred to earlier,

sharing equality, reciprocity and so on in the back and forth of question and answer, can only succeed with someone who's capable of engaging in a shared cooperative endeavor. And it's those very values that Calat least rejects in his account of the individualism of the strong man who seeks to dominate. And that point is really what I think is being exemplified when the discussion breaks down. Calicles just wants to assert himself and take more than his share of discussion. He won't throw the ball back and engage in the cooperative question and answer mode. So he poses a particular challenge here. It's not just the problem of how you persuade a person like Calicles,

but how you can engage them in dialogue at all, given that the values that are built into the practice are the very ones that Calicles rejects. What do you, Angie, what do you make of the fact that Calicles, says philosophy is not useful. It's of no importance. It's old men talking to young boys in the foreign. That's all it is. And so let's drop it and get on with real life. Yeah. Yes. I mean, he's got this very gendered male ideal of the strong, forceful man. Has it got to be male? I've women never thought like that.

No, my point is that Calicles is only interested in a male point of view. His ideal is very much a strong man. says again and again, this is what real men do. This is how real men behave. And Plato's very aware of that and picks it out in the way he presents Calicles. So for Calicles, a proper man is somebody who is practically wise and courageous and manly. His words not mine in the affairs of the city. And he's a sort of proper grown-up man, whereas philosophers are just men amongst boys and slaves amongst the free, he says, because they just sort of carer away in corners. And if they are attacked, as we were hearing earlier, they can't properly defend themselves, or at least they can't in Calicles' view.

Socrates is going to say he defends himself perfectly well because he can take care of his soul. So there is this very sharp distinction between the superior person who, for Calicles, as we've been hearing, is the strong person who can appropriate power and a greater share and go out and get fame and victory in the world and dominate others. And that ideal is very starkly opposed to this sort of cowering, weak, boyish philosopher in Calicles' portrait. Fiona, is there any ways in the claims of Caracles and Polis that Socrates just wants to trip them up?

In fact, I don't think there is. the drama of this allegation nicely shows up the very different ways in which Callagli's method of discussion or debate and Socrates method aim at a distinct kind of outcome, although both of them are very self-conscious. So Socrates' method is to get people to appreciate and examine all the beliefs they have about really important moral questions, about what is it that really counts as something that's in my own interest and what is the good life? So he wants to do that by way of engaging them in conversation according to the conversational norms that Frisbee's been talking about

and he's interested in getting people to reflect on their reasons as Angie and I have been talking about. To do this people have to be very honest and be willing to say what they really think but also to contemplate and reflect what they're really committed to even if it turns out that's the opposite of what they started out saying in the first place, even if they contradict one another in this joint search. So Socrates aims at a sort of self-conscious reflection on the giving and taking of reasons

and what it is people really think and why. So there's a certain kind of self-consciousness about it. Callicles' method, by contrast, is also self-conscious. So his method of discussion or debate occurs in the context. particularly in this dialogue, of performing in front of an audience, of winning. So he has aristic values on display here, the values of winning at any cost and being the strongest. So what he wants is to achieve in his students, if he were to teach, which is what he would do, if he was to follow in Gorgeous' footsteps, to achieve in his students the same sort of

self-conscious awareness of whether or not one's winning, whether or not one's even belittling, one's opponent into retracting what they're saying or admitting to the opposite of it, winning at any cost. So they're both quite self-conscious methods. And for that reason, I think that Socrates doesn't simply trip up the others. Calicles is accusing Socrates of doing the kind of thing that he does. Have we any idea whatsoever, Angie, that people around the place were talking about this dialogue and saying, I'm on Kalikli's side.

No, I think Socrates makes a more persuasive argument. Do we know anything at all about the reaction to this? Well, there's a story in a 4th century common era writer called Themistius, and he claims he's citing a now lost work of Aristotle. When we hear of a farmer from Corinth or the Corinthian area, who was so overcome on hearing this dialogue that he abandoned his vines and crops. and went to Athens to study at Plato's Academy. It certainly overwhelmed some people.

It is enormously powerful. And as we were hearing, it's quite, it's a brave dialogue because Plato is taking on some of the great authority figures and heroes of Athenian self mythology, such as Themistocles and Miltiades and Pericles. But it became famous pretty quickly. suggests it was being copied and distributed around the Greek world pretty quickly. It made a, so I think we can deduce it made a pretty strong impact because it's showing us and it's really forcing the Athenians to think about their own democracy because Calicles

claims that he wants to, you know, he's aspiring to be a democratic politician, but Plato puts into his mouth these profoundly anti-democratic. sentiments in that we hear that, you know, democracies are just a kind of craven conspiracy of the weak to suppress the strong. And what Plato is doing is trying to show the Athenians that if you misuse rhetoric and if you corrupt democracy, then you're providing the perfect breeding ground for tyranny. And a character like Calicles is going to emerge who's going to try to be voted in through democratic means but is actually then going to use his democratic position to destroy democracy. So it's enormously powerful. So it's not surprising to me that it was copied and distributed pretty

quickly and made an impact. Presby, we, Socrates, of course, all this is written by Plato, Socrates says that he's the best politician of all. Is that a joke? It's definitely a very striking claim, but I actually think he's deadly serious. And I think the thought there is this, that politicians as such are surely aiming to provide some benefit to the city and the citizens. That's at least their pretence, if not their real aim. I mean, no one's going to get elected if they claim they only want power for themselves. And Calickely's agrees that at least some politicians act in the interest of the citizens, though others don't. And then we then feed in the distinction between their two distinctive speech practices with one rhetoric which aims to serve the aspiring politician

in a democracy by currying favour with the demos with a view to what's pleasant and the other which has its eye on what is best for the citizens and consists in a practice of examination and question and answer in which the basis of our injustices can be exposed so we feed in that distinction And then Socrates claims that, well, it's by that speech practice that we can improve ourselves and others by seeking not to persuade people, but to challenge them through conversation, to think through the implications of our beliefs and the way Fiona was explaining, and hold them to account. Since that practice of examination is really nothing other than the practice of refuting and being refuted, Socrates as its star practitioner is then revealed as the best of all. politicians serving the people rather than himself. So I think he's very serious about that claim. Fiona, do you think that Socrates's dialogue

shifted Polis or Calicles or Georgius in that way? Do you think he won the argument at all or convinced them at all? The answer to that has to be no. It doesn't follow from that that what Socrates is doing and what Plato is doing in having his character argue that way and have that result is pointless. So let me explain. Socrates does his interlocutors a great service, I think, picking up from what Frisbee was saying just now and Angie a little earlier. He brings them to a position where they can see better what they think and why they think,

just by having a chat with them, just by having a conversation with them and asking them questions, asking them to say honestly what they think. Why is that? Why does he do that? He does that because he's interested in asking them to reflect on beliefs that they have about the topic under discussion in order to let them see what follows from those other beliefs that they hadn't considered deeply enough about this important topic of discussion, usually an ethical topic. And in the gorgeous, it's always an ethical topic. So he wants them to pay attention to things that they,

already believe that they're not paying attention to, but that are relevant. And through this kind of reflection on these other questions, such as what it is that a shameful action consists in such that it's shameful, why something shameful and other things admirable. He gets people to see that actually they have a really good reason, as good reason, sometimes better reason, for holding the opposite view than the view they started out with. So sure, they end up contradicting themselves and He refutes them and they often end up annoyed. And this is just what happens in this dialogue. So he does them a great service, in fact,

by showing them, revealing to them what it is they really think, as it were, what their commitments are on a whole range of issues. But these particular characters don't appreciate it. They don't like it at all. Some other characters in other dialogues are prepared to come to a certain kind of self-knowledge, are prepared to accept that indeed they do think things that are contrary to what they first stated and they see why they think them, and that is a real genuine discovery for them. And they're, if not grateful for it, they're accepting of it. So we have Elseabides in his dialogue doing that. These

characters don't, and they're the ones you asked me about. But the dialogue, really, ultimately, at the end of the day, is between Plato and the reader. So if that's why I think it doesn't matter that these characters whose mode of discourse is resolutely combative won't change their mode of discourse in order to come to a better understanding of what they themselves really think. So they won't do it. But the reader is left in a position not just to observe what's been going on, but to take part in this dialogue and these questions and discussions themselves to reflect on them. It seems that after dialogue breaks down with Calicles, Socrates does match. managed to successfully re-engage Calicles in discussion.

And their final back and forth together is one of the most productive exchanges that we see in the dialogue. And in that stretch, Calicles does in fact agree that he endorses a kind of speech that involves becoming the servant of the demos. And that's the very sort of claim that Socrates has been arguing from right at the very start of the dialogue when he first puts on the table the idea that rhetoric is a kind of of sycophancy. So that in a way is a triumph of persuasion that Calicles has agreed to that. Thank you. Finally, Angie, do we keep finding echoes, Georgias, down the years?

We certainly do. And the most famous example here, I think, has to be Nietzsche. So we know when Nietzsche was lecturing at Basel in the late 1860s, he mentions Calicles by name in his lectures and he treats Calicles as one of the sophists and he says that he admires the sophists because he says they possess quote the courage of all strong spirits to know their own immorality. By immorality he means going against the conventional morals of their day in a way that he thinks is good. But it's not just that specific reference because throughout Nietzsche's works particularly say the genealogy of morals, thus spake Zarathustra. beyond good and evil. We get not just general echoes of Calicles'

but we get very precise turns of phrase. And these have been collected to my mind compellingly by E.R. Dodson, an appendix to his addition of the Greek text of the Gorgias. And he's certainly convinced me that whether he knows it or not, Nietzsche is really thinking very closely about Caliclius. when he comes up with his critique of conventional morality as a conspiracy of the weak majority who lack the natural force to satisfy their own magnificent urges and then so try to restrain the natural strong man.

And that breaking free from these conventions is the mark of one of nature's lions, we get the image of the noble in nature as a magnificent, untameable blonde beast. And, sorry, finally, he writes of the coming overman in thus spake. Zarathustra is a laughing line. I mean, there are lots more. There are a lot of very precise verbal echoes.

I think Calicles hugely informs Nietzsche in a way that would horrify Plato. Well, thank you very much, Angie. Thank you, Angie Hobbes, Frisbee Sheffield, Fiona Lee, and our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, England expects that every man will. do his duty in the Battle of Trafalgar. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Well, that was a terrific run. Would you like to go on? The only thing that I would add is

a legacy and impact. And I mean, I think one of the things that's definitely worth mentioning here is that the Gorgias set the agenda for subsequent theorising about rhetoric. So, you know, it's a dialectical work that's not focused on providing a positive account of rhetoric of its own, it nonetheless initiated further discussion about the integrity and status of rhetoric as an art. Is it to be condemned as a knack, by which orators use deceit and manipulation for their own advantage, do practitioners need to know the truth about what they're talking about? It set the agenda for those sorts of questions and much later rhetorical theory as a response to that. And also not just just later rhetorical theory, but as we've been discussing, Plato's own later thought about

rhetoric, for instance, in the Fidreus, when he says philosophy is the true rhetoric, just as in the Fidreus, he says that philosophy is the true art. So Plato doesn't stop thinking about these issues. He goes on trying to see if he can interweave philosophy and rhetoric, because he must have been aware that he was using a lot of rhetorical skills in his own writing. That's true, but I'd add, have to add, don't I, that at the same time, he remained wary of the power that these wonderful orators have and their connection to sophistry. So in the analogy with flattery and pastry baking and cosmetics that Angie talked about, the sophist does get a mention and sophistry is meant to be related to rhetoric, but we don't hear much about it in this dialogue. Of course, Plato comes back and

and talks about the sophist at great length in a dialogue called the sophist. And there's one overlap that I think is absolutely fascinating, which is that both the sophist as described in the dialogue called the sophist and the retort or the orator, the rhetorician described in the Gorgias, both of them use words as images of reality one way or another in order that they make the speaker appear to be really wise, appear to be really wise when they're not, in fact, when they're not really. So he holds on to that. Just to counter the Nietzsche as the legacy, which I think you're right, Angie, I'm not sure how Peter would have thought about that.

I think there's another sort of twist to its ethical impact because it had a big influence on Hannah Arendt, the gorgeous. She focuses on, on the the two propositions that Socrates puts forward in the work. So first, the claim that it's better that the whole world disagree with me than that I being one person should disagree and be out of tune with my own self, which speaks to Socrates' commitment to consistency, as you mentioned earlier. And then the second claim that it's better to suffer than do wrong, which we haven't talked much about, but which is clearly central. And the relationship between those two claims is something that Arndt uses to explore whether there's a connection between dialogical thinking and abstention

from wrongdoing. And she uses that to bolster her account of Eichmann's banality and thoughtlessness. And briefly, the thought there is this, that one ought to make one's own self-consistent, Socrates's first claim, for fear that internal relations will be disturbed otherwise in the thinking dialogue, but wrongdoers are at odds with themselves, so if one is to think, one should abstain from wrongdoing. So Arn't tries to derive a moral proposition that it's better to suffer than do wrong from Socrates's dialogical activity, and in that way, Socrates becomes the discoverer of the secular conscience. And I really like that reading, because I think it puts its finger on the relationship between practices of thinking and speaking and living a good life, which is so

central to the gorgeous. So scrutiny of ourselves and the values we live by is the discursive practice that enables us to avoid injustice. And that ethical concern seems to be what grounds ultimately the superiority of philosophy to rhetoric in the work. Something I really would love to talk about is the relationship between power and pleasure and hedonism in Calicles, because yes, in his first speech, he does his political

might is right and in a really strong way that it's not just enjoyable to appropriate more, but it's actually a naturally moral imperative for the superior person to appropriate power and a greater share of goods, and that's a strong statement. He then initially thinks that

commits him to unqualified hedonism, that, you know, it's magnificent to have your desires as great as possible, any old desire and to satisfy each when it reaches its peak. And that, the unqualified hedonist is the same as this superior, Leonine man. And Socrates, to my mind, I'd be interested to know what Frisbee and Fiona thing, but to my mind, Socrates shows Calicles He's not really an unqualified hedonist at all, and he doesn't like the idea of passive, cowardly pleasures being as equal to, you know, strong and, quote, manly pleasures. But so I think his unqualified hedonism is defeated, but to my mind, the might is right theory is never fully defeated in the Gorgias. And in my view, that's why Plato comes back to this in a different but similar views in the Thrasymachus in Reparckes. one, and it then takes him nine books of the Republic to try to come up with a theory, which

he finds at least satisfying to himself. It's the might as right theory that is the real problem here. That's how I read it. I agree with you about the discussion of power and the importance of that fatal concession, I think Callet-Lies makes. When he admits that there are some pleasures that are better than others. He seems to acknowledge there are good and bad pleasures. But I think that does do some damage, doesn't it, to Calicles' thesis? Because that leads to the claim that, well, we need some kind of expert, or at least we need some kind of understanding to distinguish between good and bad pleasures. And then we get understanding into the picture, and it's not all about the strong man. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by

Simon Tillotson. Arland, a new five-part supernatural Duller for BBC. Radio 4. Welcome to Harland, Town of the Future. Things happen here sometimes, especially at night. The past does not exist here. Police in Harland have appealed for the public's help with the investigation into the disappearance of local teenager Evie Bennett. It's been concreted over and forgotten. The worst of it is still to come. This is only the beginning. She's right. It wants to suck me down into the void and destroy me. And not just me, everything. I'm the only one here at night. What if it comes for me next? If you really want to understand something, you have to go right to the edge. What is it? Is it something real?

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