Keaton Peters
GSI: Jerilyn Sambrooke
October 8, 2016
Precis: Plato’s Gorgias
The section out of Plato’s Gorgias that I will focus on begins at 464b when Socrates enters
his long speech to Polus and Gorgias on his conception of rhetoric. Contrary to
the notion that rhetoric an honorable art of politics, Socrates diminishes the
value of rhetoric claiming it is merely a knack for flattery, going farther to
claim rhetoric deceives the soul in matters of justice. The primary device
Socrates reasons with is analogy. He makes a division between soul and body and
for the latter identifies medicine as the true practice for improving the body
as opposed to pastry-making, a practice that can make a body feel pleasure yet
is not good for the individual’s health. A pastry-maker flatters a hungry
patron with a tasty pastry, just as an orator flatters an eager audience with
rhetoric. By flattery, pastry-making passes as medicine, and rhetoric passes as
what Socrates calls “corrective justice.”
Socrates makes the analogy crystal clear multiple
times, but there are subtleties to this section of text, especially when he
speaks about flattery. He explains the relationship that four concepts
(gymnastics, medicine, law giving, and corrective justice) have to flattery, “These
four things… serve what is best for the body and the soul respectively.
Flattery perceives this. I don’t mean she knows but she shrewdly guesses, and
she divides herself in four, puts on the mask of each part, and pretends to be
the character she puts on, caring nothing for what is best. She ever hunts
after folly and deceives with what is most pleasant, so that she seems to be of
highest worth.” (464c-d) The claim is that flattery is a foolish practice of
guessing how to deceive the body or soul to disregard what is best for it.
Flattery manipulates by inducing pleasure. Pleasure allows flattery to appear
to people as if it has the same value to their body or soul as medicine and gymnastics,
or justice and law giving. It is a crucial point when he names rhetoric, “I
call it [Rhetoric] flattery” (465a) and names it a knack not an art because he
both refutes that rhetoric can teach justice, and reinforces how seeking to
learn or being convinced by a knack for flattery (i.e. rhetoric) deceives and
puts the soul in jeopardy.
The understanding of rhetoric as deceptive flattery
that misleads the soul helps Socrates defend a larger argument about politics.
The reason he gave such a lengthy speech was because Gorgias said “Please tell
us why you say rhetoric is an unsubstantial image of a part of politics.”
(463e) The flattery Socrates refers to is strictly in the field of politics,
and not even a defining factor of politics, but rather a piece of politics which
we cannot use to learn anything substantial about the whole of politics. He
calls rhetoric an image to further emphasize that rhetoric is not the thing in
itself, justice, instead it only appears to be like that thing. The
significance for Socrates is the division between rhetoric and philosophy.
Philosophy is a practice Socrates has dedicated himself to and in this part of
the text he uses philosophy to launch an argument against the utility of
rhetoric as articulated by his counterparts. This section of text demonstrates
why Socrates thinks rhetoric used in attempt to teach people to act justly will
only give them a false impression of the true justice. He will later explain
how people are worse off who have committed injustice but have not been
punished for it and rhetoric will play a role in making the offender think that
they should not be punished. At that point Socrates balances the deceptive version
of rhetoric with the only version he thinks can do good: to convince someone
who committed injustice that they need punishment. These key conclusions from
the dialogue need arise from the argument to Polus and Gorgias about Rhetoric
as flattery.
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