Plato’s Gorgias: The Power of Rhetoric
A Discussion Seminar
Join us at AAI this Spring as we explore the Power of Rhetoric and Socrates’ Most Radical Defense of Justice.
Open to Students At Harvard and boston area universities
Starting February 20th, we will meet for 6 weeks every Tuesday from 7 pm to 8:30pm at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge.
There is no cost to the program, and each week's readings will be provided to all participants.
The translation we are using is by James H. Nichols (Agora Editions, Cornell Univ. Press, 1998).
Refreshments will be provided at each session.
At a time when our politics has become increasingly unrestrained, angry, and accusatory, we turn for insight to the first, and most rigorous and radical, inquiry into the relation of rhetoric to justice: the Gorgias of Plato. It takes place in a democratic Athens that has fallen prey to party faction and demagogues, as a hard-right tyranny is about to seize power. In this shadow of decay and decadence, Socrates gives us his most extreme defense of justice, even anticipating to a striking extent the success of Christian rhetoric; for example, he too proclaims that one should remove first the plank in one's own eye, and eagerly denounce oneself and seek punishment for one's own wrongdoing. If Socrates is serious and what he says is true, we are warned our lives would be turned "upside down". Do we live for freedom and the satisfaction of desire, as Callicles claims we should—is this “virtue and happiness” for us? Or do we live, in a way perhaps obscured to us, for some higher hope or demand, such as justice, that would be worthy of even the greatest sacrifices?
Socrates tests whether Gorgias, one of the most famous teachers of rhetoric, knows the cause of the power to persuade—that is, whether he possesses a true art or science of rhetoric. Does he understand what in us, in our fears or longings, causes us to be moved so greatly, to pity or anger, by speeches about just and unjust things? Socrates discovers that, unbeknownst to Gorgias, his students are moved by dangerous and extreme political views. One of them, an especially bold, clever, and deeply confused young man named Callicles, says that the best man, the lion among us, should shake off the tyranny of law and the pious lies of the many that keep him weak and humble, and rise up to show himself the master that he really is by nature—by enslaving the rest of us. Self-empowerment for tyrants! But Socrates surprisingly, paradoxically, suggests that the problem with this most immoral guy is that deep down inside he somehow believes justice is what counts; he too really believes, or wants to believe, that the worst thing of all is to commit injustice and get away with it. Socrates says that he and you—all of us—will live our entire lives in disagreement with ourselves, in confusion and disharmony, if we can’t refute that belief. How can this make sense? Could Socrates be right?
