March 23, 2026
Plato vs. the Sophists: Rhetoric, Power, and the Making of Callicles | Ep. 7 pt 2
About This Episode
Can rhetoric make better citizens — or does it simply make better manipulators through the art of persuasion? In Part 2 of the Plato vs. the Sophists arc, Notions of Progress follows Plato’s argument from the Meno to the Gorgias to answer that question. Building on Part 1’s examination of the Cave allegory and the doctrine of recollection, this episode turns to Plato’s two remaining pillars of response to the Sophists: the unteachability of virtue and the failure of rhetoric as a genuine craft. Scholars W.K.C. Guthrie, E.R. Dodds, Roslyn Weiss, George Klosko, and G.B. Kerferd serve as the scholarly guides. The Meno dismantles the Sophist educational claim — virtue cannot be taught by the Sophist mechanism. The Gorgias then dismantles the Sophist political claim — rhetoric is not the engine of civic progress but its counterfeit. The episode culminates with Callicles: not a villain, but the coherent product of Sophist education working exactly as intended. Applying Retz’s framework, Plato’s counter-attack forecloses the Sophist horizontal theory of civic progress entirely — and replaces it with a vertical reorientation toward the Forms.
――――――――――――――――――――
Show Notes & Timestamps
• 00:00 Introduction to Plato’s critique of Sophist education
• 05:54 Can virtue be taught? Socrates’ examination in the Meno
• 14:40 The three tests of genuine technē in rhetoric
• 18:55 The portrayal of rhetoric in the Gorgias
• 22:50 Callicles and the pursuit of power and domination
• 26:21 Implications for civic virtue and human progress
• 29:16 Conclusion: What does genuine moral education look like?
――――――――――――――――――――
Key Concepts & Terms
Paideia [please add pronumciation] — civic education
The Sophist programme of education aimed at producing effective citizens capable of participating in democratic life. For the Sophists, paideia centred on the transmission of rhetorical skill as the master tool of civic virtue. Plato’s argument in the Gorgias is that this programme mistakes a knack for a craft — and that its endpoint, as Klosko demonstrates through Callicles, is the production of men who equate political success with moral worth.
Technē [please add pronumciation] — craft or genuine expertise
A genuine technē meets three criteria in Plato’s examination: it has a determinate subject matter, it aims at the genuine good of its object, and it can give a rational account of itself. Dodds frames the opening of the Gorgias as a direct test of whether rhetoric qualifies. On every count Socrates argues it fails — rhetoric has no fixed domain, aims at what pleases rather than what is good, and cannot explain its own principles. It is a knack (empeiria), not a craft.
Aporia [please add pronumciation] — productive impasse
The state of genuine puzzlement that Socratic inquiry produces. The Meno ends in aporia: virtue cannot be taught by the Sophist mechanism, but what genuine virtue-teaching would require is left deliberately open. As Weiss reads it, this is not a failure of the argument but its point — the clearing of false certainty is the precondition for genuine philosophical inquiry.
Doxa [please add pronumciation] — true opinion
Distinguished from episteme (genuine knowledge) in the Meno. The virtuous statesman operates by true opinion, not knowledge — like a poet who produces fine things without being able to say why. Plato’s point is that true opinion, however reliable in practice, will not hold under examination. The Sophist educational programme produces doxa, not episteme — and doxa cannot be systematically taught or institutionally transmitted.
――――――――――――――――――――
Fascinating Historical Insights
Dodds and the Nietzsche Connection
In his appendix to Plato: Gorgias, Dodds draws a direct line between Callicles and Nietzsche’s will-to-power tradition. The resemblance, Dodds argues, is not accidental — both thinkers start from the premise that conventional justice is simply the mechanism by which the weak restrain the strong. Callicles anticipates the Nietzschean critique of slave morality by two and a half millennia. Dodds takes the connection seriously enough to devote a full appendix to it, treating Callicles not as a period piece but as a recurring philosophical position that resurfaces whenever civic consensus breaks down.
The Deliberate Aporia of the Meno
The Meno does not end with a refutation. It ends with a question deliberately left open. As Weiss reads it, Plato’s conclusion — that virtue comes by divine dispensation rather than teaching — is not his final word on the subject but a provocation. The Sophists claimed to be precisely the teachers the Meno cannot find. By ending in aporia rather than resolution, Plato signals that the problem of moral education is genuinely unsolved — and that the Republic will have to address it on entirely different foundations.
Gorgias: Honourable but Unreflective
Dodds’s reading of Gorgias himself is one of the episode’s more nuanced moments. Gorgias is not dishonest — he simply has not thought through the implications of his own craft. When Socrates forces the question of whether rhetoric can be used for injustice, Gorgias retreats: he assumes his students already know what is just. Dodds reads this not as evasion but as genuine unreflectiveness. The crack in the Sophist edifice, Plato shows, runs through its most honourable representative — not just through its most dangerous one.
The Escalation from Gorgias to Polus to Callicles
Klosko’s reading of the three interlocutors as a dramatic sequence is one of the episode’s structural anchors. Gorgias assumes virtue; Polus drops the pretence and argues for power openly; Callicles takes the logic to its conclusion and argues that natural superiority justifies domination. The escalation is Plato’s argument in dramatic form: the Gorgias does not need to state its conclusion — it enacts it across three progressively candid voices.
――――――――――――――――――――
Resources & Further Reading
Primary Sources
• Plato. Meno, 87c–100b. The teachability argument and the doctrine of recollection. Any reliable translation serves; Grube is recommended for clarity.
• Plato. Gorgias, 447a–527e. The full dialogue: the rhetoric examination, the Polus episode, the Callicles section, and the eschatological myth.
Works Discussed
• Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV. Cambridge University Press, 1975. pp. 241–265 (Meno commentary) and pp. 294–311 (Gorgias commentary). The standard scholarly baseline for both dialogues. Measured, comprehensive, authoritative.
• Dodds, E.R. Plato: Gorgias. Oxford University Press, 1959. Introduction pp. 1–30 and Appendix (Socrates, Callicles, and Nietzsche) p. 387. The critical edition. Dodds’s introduction and appendix are essential reading for anyone serious about the Gorgias.
• Weiss, Roslyn. Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato’s Meno. Oxford University Press, 2001. Chs. 5–6. The most forceful recent reading of the Meno’s aporetic conclusion. Weiss argues the aporia is the point, not the problem.
• Klosko, George. The Development of Plato’s Political Theory. Oxford University Press, 2006. Ch. IV, pp. 39–54. Essential for the Callicles-as-coherent-endpoint argument. Klosko’s reading of the three interlocutors as a dramatic sequence structures the episode’s third section.
• Kerferd, G.B. Articles on Thrasymachus and Protagoras. Phronesis, pp. 19–27 and pp. 42–45. Establishes the Sophist tradition’s consistent claim that political skill is a form of expertise. Plato’s argument targets the tradition, not just Gorgias.
Further Context
• Retz, Tyson. Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge University Press, 2022. The series anchor. Applying Retz’s framework, Plato’s counter-attack forecloses the Sophist horizontal theory of civic progress and replaces it with a vertical reorientation — a move that places Plato firmly within Retz’s first category: No Progress.
• Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. III. Cambridge University Press, 1969. Background on the Sophist tradition established in Episode 5. Protagoras, Gorgias, and the nomos/physis antithesis.
――――――――――――――――――――
Related Episodes
• Episode 5: The Sophists — Human Agency, Technē, and the First Theory of Civic Progress. Establishes the Sophist framework that E7 dismantles.
• Episode 6: Plato vs. the Sophists (Part 1) — The Cave, Recollection, and the Case Against Cumulative Knowledge. The first two pillars of Plato’s response.
――――――――――――――――――――
Coming Up Next
Episode 8 turns to Aristotle — and a fundamentally different theory of human development. Where Plato forecloses the Sophist vision of civic progress, Aristotle rebuilds it on new foundations: telos, potentiality, and a progress that is directional but finite.
――――――――――――――――――――
Listen & Subscribe
Website — notionsofprogress.com
Email: marshall@notionsofprogress.com
――――――――――――――――――――
About the Show
Notions of Progress traces ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of AI. Each episode examines how thinkers across history have conceived of human advancement — and what those conceptions reveal about the assumptions of their time and ours. Hosted by Marshall, the show operates as a scholarly curation: surfacing the debates and the scholarship rather than prescribing which position is correct.
New episodes every two weeks on Mondays.
Host: Marshall | Contact: [email] | Website: [link]
00:00 - Introduction to Plato's critique of sophist education
05:54 - Can virtue be taught? Socrates' examination in The Menno
14:40 - The three tests of genuine techne in rhetoric
18:55 - The portrayal of rhetoric in The Gorgias
22:50 - Calicles and the pursuit of power and domination
26:21 - Implications for civic virtue and human progress
29:16 - Conclusion: What does genuine moral education look like?
1
00:00:00,993 --> 00:00:04,294
Hi,
2
00:00:10,592 --> 00:00:14,534
welcome
3
00:00:15,034 --> 00:00:18,412
to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas of progress from
4
00:00:18,460 --> 00:00:20,479
antiquity to the age of AI.
5
00:00:21,905 --> 00:00:25,959
In our last episode, we looked at Plato's challenges to the Sophists' claim
6
00:00:26,456 --> 00:00:29,651
The progress is collective and cumulative, arguing,
7
00:00:29,924 --> 00:00:33,505
through the cave and through the theory of recollection, that genuine
8
00:00:33,537 --> 00:00:36,877
knowledge cannot be handed from one person to another like a package.
9
00:00:38,017 --> 00:00:41,630
We saw this most sharply in the prisoner who returns to the cave and
10
00:00:41,710 --> 00:00:43,701
cannot describe what he has seen to the others,
11
00:00:45,178 --> 00:00:49,096
and they were not able to understand it. Today we
12
00:00:49,596 --> 00:00:52,966
have followed that assault to the next target, Having challenged how the
13
00:00:53,466 --> 00:00:57,158
Sophists thought knowledge moved between people, Plato now turns
14
00:00:57,206 --> 00:01:01,302
to the two pillars that held up their entire educational program: the
15
00:01:01,802 --> 00:01:04,771
claim that virtue can be taught, and the claim that rhetoric,
16
00:01:05,333 --> 00:01:09,236
the art of persuasion, was the instrument to teach it. He further questions the
17
00:01:09,736 --> 00:01:12,802
notion of rhetoric as a craft at all, and asks what happens when
18
00:01:12,818 --> 00:01:16,496
it is mastered. He examines whether the destination it leads
19
00:01:16,996 --> 00:01:20,764
to is a civic virtue, But instead, he shows us something far darker.
20
00:01:20,988 --> 00:01:24,003
By the end of this episode, here are the key issues we will be examining:
21
00:01:24,420 --> 00:01:28,525
Why the sophists' claim to teach arete, moral excellence,
22
00:01:29,230 --> 00:01:33,448
the virtue of a good citizen, cannot, as Plato argues, withstand examination.
23
00:01:34,923 --> 00:01:38,675
Why Plato argues that the sophist educational program does not better
24
00:01:39,172 --> 00:01:42,764
citizens, but, as the dialogue the Gorgias
25
00:01:43,101 --> 00:01:45,105
reveals, something closer to the opposite.
26
00:01:46,644 --> 00:01:49,448
What the distinction between two concepts we will review today,
27
00:01:49,929 --> 00:01:53,214
paideia and techne, actually means, and why
28
00:01:53,278 --> 00:01:57,108
Plato thinks the sophists confuse the two. And lastly,
29
00:01:57,925 --> 00:02:01,594
why Plato's mission in these dialogues is, as Professor Dodds argues,
30
00:02:02,171 --> 00:02:05,761
fundamentally destructive, designed to expose the
31
00:02:05,777 --> 00:02:09,062
hollowness of the sophist enterprise completely and
32
00:02:09,562 --> 00:02:13,372
propose an alternate philosophy that is vertically oriented for the soul
33
00:02:13,725 --> 00:02:17,041
and for the individual. We'll be looking at two texts that will drive this
34
00:02:17,153 --> 00:02:20,357
episode today. In the dialogue The Meno,
35
00:02:21,335 --> 00:02:25,068
Plato asks whether virtue can actually be taught and argues through his
36
00:02:25,116 --> 00:02:28,993
examination of Athens' most celebrated statesmen that
37
00:02:29,906 --> 00:02:33,126
they didn't even possess it as knowledge, and nor did they pass it to their
38
00:02:33,626 --> 00:02:36,811
sons. In The Gorgias, he turns to rhetoric,
39
00:02:37,196 --> 00:02:40,848
the art of public persuasion through speech, and asks whether it is a genuine
40
00:02:41,025 --> 00:02:44,299
craft or just merely the ability to please a crowd.
41
00:02:45,119 --> 00:02:48,203
He follows that argument to its darkest conclusion through
42
00:02:48,703 --> 00:02:52,732
the figure of Callicles. During this episode, we will reference the following terms,
43
00:02:52,941 --> 00:02:56,121
some of which you have seen before and some of which will be new to
44
00:02:56,621 --> 00:03:00,121
you: 1. Arete: This is
45
00:03:00,137 --> 00:03:03,494
the excellence of character, the virtue a citizen needs
46
00:03:03,526 --> 00:03:05,277
to participate well in public life. 2.
47
00:03:07,140 --> 00:03:09,790
Eia: The formation of who you become.
48
00:03:10,513 --> 00:03:14,061
Education in the fullest sense of the word. It's moral, intellectual,
49
00:03:14,205 --> 00:03:17,945
and civic. Techne, a word we've seen in previous episodes,
50
00:03:18,620 --> 00:03:22,344
that means a skill or a craft, something with a clear subject
51
00:03:22,392 --> 00:03:25,811
matter, a defined aim, and the ability to explain its own reasoning.
52
00:03:25,940 --> 00:03:28,428
And the last one is brand new,
53
00:03:28,973 --> 00:03:32,794
elenchus. This is Socrates' method of cross-examination,
54
00:03:33,388 --> 00:03:36,615
a systematic process of questioning that strips away false
55
00:03:37,115 --> 00:03:40,253
certainty and drives the individual forward in search of answers.
56
00:03:41,951 --> 00:03:46,068
At the heart of this episode is a debate regarding the function of education and
57
00:03:46,568 --> 00:03:49,433
its limits. Plato argues that arete,
58
00:03:50,202 --> 00:03:53,742
genuine virtue, cannot be taught at all, and that
59
00:03:54,242 --> 00:03:58,693
the sophists, in claiming that it could, were offering technical training packaged
60
00:03:58,725 --> 00:04:02,249
as moral education. Socrates' method was systematic.
61
00:04:02,778 --> 00:04:06,302
He cross-examined anyone claiming to know what virtue was until the
62
00:04:06,802 --> 00:04:10,453
claim completely collapsed under its own weight. In The Gorgias,
63
00:04:11,287 --> 00:04:16,051
Plato further showed that the sophist educational program, taken to its
64
00:04:16,163 --> 00:04:19,740
logical extent, does not produce civic virtue
65
00:04:20,109 --> 00:04:24,311
but instead produces individuals driven by unconstrained ambition.
66
00:04:25,867 --> 00:04:29,139
Scholars including Dardes have positioned Plato here as
67
00:04:29,315 --> 00:04:32,683
clearing the ground, and he would only fill this in in later works.
68
00:04:33,966 --> 00:04:37,799
This episode follows that reading. It is about what Plato took apart
69
00:04:37,976 --> 00:04:42,078
and what he left open. So before we move forward, let me just say,
70
00:04:42,303 --> 00:04:46,005
why are we doing this? And how does this story that we're about to tell
71
00:04:46,505 --> 00:04:49,931
today relate to progress? In the last episode, we looked
72
00:04:50,431 --> 00:04:53,697
at the allegory in the cave, and we looked at two fundamental questions. The first
73
00:04:54,197 --> 00:04:57,511
one was about who could be taught, who was included in
74
00:04:57,527 --> 00:05:00,861
this group of folks that could be educated, the democratization
75
00:05:00,893 --> 00:05:04,370
of education. The second question looked at is how
76
00:05:04,435 --> 00:05:08,441
knowledge in general is accumulated, or is it accumulated across society?
77
00:05:09,019 --> 00:05:12,666
Is it a circular motion, or are societies accumulating
78
00:05:12,698 --> 00:05:16,602
knowledge and moving forward? In today's episode,
79
00:05:16,634 --> 00:05:20,329
we're going to look at Pillars 3 and 4. So these were
80
00:05:20,972 --> 00:05:24,635
arguments that Plato made against the sophists in further readings
81
00:05:24,667 --> 00:05:27,848
that we'll discuss today. And he discusses two other questions.
82
00:05:28,763 --> 00:05:31,157
First, he looks at the idea of virtue.
83
00:05:31,960 --> 00:05:35,334
Can virtue even be taught? Can we teach people to be good citizens?
84
00:05:36,474 --> 00:05:39,810
And then the second piece of this, which we'll see most clearly in The Gorgias,
85
00:05:40,484 --> 00:05:43,740
regards how does this operate in action. And this is
86
00:05:43,772 --> 00:05:47,606
a key point. You will see through the character
87
00:05:48,106 --> 00:05:53,076
that he uses, Callicles, that this is a Nietzschean kind of a character
88
00:05:53,576 --> 00:05:56,813
of sorts, and today might be looked at as a demagogue. So listen
89
00:05:56,845 --> 00:06:00,567
carefully to the argument that he puts forth against, and that he has coming from
90
00:06:00,615 --> 00:06:04,049
Callicles, and how he tries to take him down. Okay,
91
00:06:04,851 --> 00:06:09,009
so in addressing this issue, Plato wrote one of his most well-known dialogues,
92
00:06:09,041 --> 00:06:12,493
the Meno, a direct examination of whether virtue could
93
00:06:12,993 --> 00:06:16,795
be taught at all, or whether anyone, including the Sophists, actually knew what
94
00:06:16,811 --> 00:06:20,487
virtue even was. The Meno was written around
95
00:06:20,921 --> 00:06:24,870
385 BC, placing it among what scholars identify
96
00:06:25,079 --> 00:06:28,514
as Plato's transitional dialogues. These are the works that sit between
97
00:06:28,546 --> 00:06:31,613
his early examinations and the great constructive works like
98
00:06:31,677 --> 00:06:36,092
the Republic, which is well known. Guthrie situates
99
00:06:36,592 --> 00:06:41,214
this at the point where Plato begins to move beyond pure interrogation towards
100
00:06:41,714 --> 00:06:45,533
something a lot more ambitious, which makes its deliberately unresolved
101
00:06:45,710 --> 00:06:49,178
ending all the more significant. It's a short
102
00:06:49,678 --> 00:06:53,722
dialogue, a conversation between Socrates and a young Thessalian
103
00:06:54,413 --> 00:06:58,041
aristocrat named Meno, who opens with a direct question.
104
00:06:58,876 --> 00:07:02,248
Can virtue be taught? The Sophists had staked
105
00:07:02,748 --> 00:07:05,138
their entire educational program on the answer being yes.
106
00:07:06,118 --> 00:07:10,004
Their students, their fees, their standing in Athensâall
107
00:07:10,052 --> 00:07:13,873
of it rested on the claim that virtue was something that they could reliably produce
108
00:07:14,210 --> 00:07:17,197
in a person. Now, what do we mean by virtue here?
109
00:07:18,321 --> 00:07:21,580
Arete means something closer to human excellence,
110
00:07:21,773 --> 00:07:25,303
the qualities that make a person genuinely good. ânot just capable or
111
00:07:25,803 --> 00:07:28,877
clever, but just, courageous, and capable of living well.
112
00:07:30,031 --> 00:07:32,643
The sophists claim that they can produce that in a person.
113
00:07:33,220 --> 00:07:34,998
Plato's question is: Can they?
114
00:07:36,441 --> 00:07:40,399
In the Meno, Socrates opens with a carefully constructed proposition.
115
00:07:41,472 --> 00:07:44,934
He says, if virtue is a kind of knowledge, then it should be
116
00:07:45,434 --> 00:07:49,148
teachable, because knowledge, by definition, can be transmitted from one person
117
00:07:49,244 --> 00:07:52,776
to another. That is the sophist premise stated in the most
118
00:07:53,276 --> 00:07:56,149
generous form. Plato has Socrates accept it for the sake of argument,
119
00:07:56,888 --> 00:08:00,679
but then he turns it against him as we move forward. The question shifts.
120
00:08:01,610 --> 00:08:04,999
It is no longer whether virtue should be taught, or it
121
00:08:05,499 --> 00:08:08,822
becomes an empirical question. Are there actual people who can teach it,
122
00:08:09,079 --> 00:08:12,355
who are qualified to teach it? Where are the teachers?
123
00:08:13,913 --> 00:08:17,252
Socrates turns to the historical record. He examines
124
00:08:17,429 --> 00:08:20,460
Athens' most celebrated statesmen: Themistocles,
125
00:08:20,572 --> 00:08:24,148
Pericles, Thucydides, men whose public virtue
126
00:08:24,277 --> 00:08:28,190
seemed beyond question. And then he asks the question to Meno and Meno's
127
00:08:28,690 --> 00:08:32,215
companion Anytus, who was a prominent Athenian democrat
128
00:08:32,263 --> 00:08:35,615
who will later become, ironically, one of Socrates' accusers.
129
00:08:36,353 --> 00:08:39,785
He asks them, did they transmit that virtue to their sons?
130
00:08:41,100 --> 00:08:43,794
Professor Guthrie, in his careful reading of this passage,
131
00:08:43,906 --> 00:08:47,387
documents the answer the dialogue arrives at. In each case,
132
00:08:47,595 --> 00:08:51,606
no. Socrates concludes that the sons of these excellent,
133
00:08:51,670 --> 00:08:55,536
distinguished men did not inherit their fathers' excellence.
134
00:08:56,258 --> 00:08:59,707
This goes right to the issue about whether or not it could be taught,
135
00:09:00,028 --> 00:09:03,573
and if so, who would be teaching it. And this is Plato's
136
00:09:03,622 --> 00:09:06,991
first cut: the sophists claimed to teach what
137
00:09:07,071 --> 00:09:10,263
Athens' most distinguished statesmen could not pass on to their own sons.
138
00:09:11,258 --> 00:09:15,124
Plato's argument, as Guthrie reads it, is that this is not a coincidence
139
00:09:15,624 --> 00:09:19,281
or a failure of effort. It reveals something far more fundamental,
140
00:09:20,004 --> 00:09:23,295
and that is that virtue is not the kind of thing that can be
141
00:09:23,795 --> 00:09:27,116
transmitted from one person or another, regardless of who's doing the teaching.
142
00:09:27,614 --> 00:09:30,360
In other words, he argues that this cannot be taught.
143
00:09:31,162 --> 00:09:34,775
Here a sharp clarification is needed, because Plato
144
00:09:34,855 --> 00:09:39,030
is not simply on the other side of this argument from the Sophists. The Sophists
145
00:09:39,094 --> 00:09:42,161
claim to have the knowledge of virtue and how to teach it.
146
00:09:42,996 --> 00:09:45,147
Socrates claimed they had neither.
147
00:09:46,673 --> 00:09:50,077
Socrates deployed a method, as we discussed earlier, known as
148
00:09:50,093 --> 00:09:53,803
the lynchus. And this is a process of systematic
149
00:09:54,303 --> 00:09:58,540
cross-examination. As Professor Weiss, a contemporary scholar
150
00:09:59,040 --> 00:10:02,282
of Plato, argues, this rigorous process of cross-examination
151
00:10:02,314 --> 00:10:05,735
does not deliver virtue; it delivers the recognition
152
00:10:05,927 --> 00:10:09,476
of ignorance. She says this in the best of senses.
153
00:10:10,263 --> 00:10:14,599
And that recognition, Professor Weiss contends, is itself
154
00:10:14,743 --> 00:10:18,228
a form of wisdom. Only those who understand the limits
155
00:10:18,276 --> 00:10:21,953
of what they know are capable of genuinely seeking
156
00:10:22,210 --> 00:10:25,374
what they do not. So this is a kind of humility about what
157
00:10:25,422 --> 00:10:28,617
we know and what we can know. Ignorance,
158
00:10:28,794 --> 00:10:31,717
therefore, is not the opposite of knowledge,
159
00:10:32,423 --> 00:10:35,795
but actually the doorway to it. So while the sophists were
160
00:10:36,295 --> 00:10:40,452
boosting their students' confidence, Socrates was engaged in a process
161
00:10:40,952 --> 00:10:44,002
designed to help his interlocutor recognize how little they actually knew.
162
00:10:45,431 --> 00:10:49,189
As Professor Guthrie reads it, "The sophist's promise to teach virtue
163
00:10:49,205 --> 00:10:52,465
was not just overconfident; it was built on a foundation
164
00:10:52,562 --> 00:10:56,079
that just could not last." So
165
00:10:56,175 --> 00:11:00,094
what does Plato conclude from all of this? Well, not that
166
00:11:00,190 --> 00:11:04,028
virtue is impossible, but something actually far more unsettling.
167
00:11:05,185 --> 00:11:08,960
He concludes that what passes for virtue in public
168
00:11:09,460 --> 00:11:12,864
life actually is merely true opinion,
169
00:11:13,378 --> 00:11:16,993
and it's not knowledge. True opinion, as Socrates describes
170
00:11:17,493 --> 00:11:21,299
in the Meno, is a correct belief that a person holds
171
00:11:21,492 --> 00:11:24,689
without being able to explain why it is correct. So you
172
00:11:25,189 --> 00:11:29,155
have a belief, sometimes it's actually correct, but you have no idea why it exists.
173
00:11:29,508 --> 00:11:33,523
It comes to us through instinct, upbringing, habit, or what
174
00:11:34,023 --> 00:11:36,878
Socrates calls pointedly, divine dispensation.
175
00:11:38,275 --> 00:11:41,566
So we may act rightly on the basis of it, but we can't
176
00:11:42,066 --> 00:11:45,242
teach it, can't defend it under questioning, and we can't
177
00:11:45,742 --> 00:11:49,865
pass it on to anybody reliably because we don't truly understand why
178
00:11:49,929 --> 00:11:54,103
it exists in the first place. So he's kind of describing here the idea
179
00:11:54,167 --> 00:11:57,763
of a belief that you hold, that you carry through, that you've acquired through
180
00:11:58,263 --> 00:12:01,876
habit, through social norms, and you've never really looked at why it exists or
181
00:12:02,376 --> 00:12:05,957
be able to justify it. But sometimes it turns out to be the quote unquote
182
00:12:05,973 --> 00:12:09,428
correct way of being. So, for example,
183
00:12:09,749 --> 00:12:13,268
he raises, a person could hold a strong opinion about the right road
184
00:12:13,768 --> 00:12:16,433
to take, but not knowing why it's the right road to take.
185
00:12:18,024 --> 00:12:21,575
And they may arrive at this destination as somebody who
186
00:12:21,623 --> 00:12:24,226
does, who actually does know why.
187
00:12:25,575 --> 00:12:28,979
The difference is, if the road conditions change and someone
188
00:12:29,171 --> 00:12:32,286
asks that person their reasoning, if they don't have it,
189
00:12:33,121 --> 00:12:36,156
the person with knowledge will be the one who will be able to guide and
190
00:12:36,253 --> 00:12:39,833
navigate a new path. The person who is only existing
191
00:12:40,106 --> 00:12:43,735
on true opinion is lost. So this,
192
00:12:43,960 --> 00:12:47,251
as Professor Weiss carefully argues, is precisely the
193
00:12:47,751 --> 00:12:51,956
problem with what the sophists were producing. Their students could not give reasons
194
00:12:51,988 --> 00:12:55,357
for themselves. And true opinion, she argues, cannot be
195
00:12:55,857 --> 00:12:58,950
reliably passed on precisely because it carries no account of itself.
196
00:12:59,687 --> 00:13:03,136
It just wanders. The sophists were not producing citizens capable
197
00:13:03,636 --> 00:13:07,354
of genuine moral reasoning. They were instead producing individuals
198
00:13:07,690 --> 00:13:10,305
who could perform virtue, or the look of virtue,
199
00:13:11,235 --> 00:13:13,272
until the moment Socrates asked them why.
200
00:13:15,004 --> 00:13:18,532
That is not civic virtue, according to Socrates. That is the
201
00:13:19,032 --> 00:13:22,959
appearance of virtue. So what Plato achieves in the Meno goes to
202
00:13:23,459 --> 00:13:27,371
the heart of the Sophist vision of civic progress. As both Guthrie
203
00:13:27,980 --> 00:13:31,638
and Professor George Klosko, a contemporary scholar of ancient
204
00:13:31,767 --> 00:13:35,906
political philosophy, argue, he dismantles the intellectual foundation
205
00:13:36,002 --> 00:13:40,254
on which that vision rested. The Sophists believed
206
00:13:40,754 --> 00:13:44,521
that citizens could become more just, capable, and virtuous through
207
00:13:44,666 --> 00:13:47,843
education. This is the cornerstone of their whole program.
208
00:13:48,854 --> 00:13:52,465
That belief rested entirely on the claim that virtue was
209
00:13:52,529 --> 00:13:56,445
teachable. But Socrates' examination reveals something
210
00:13:56,477 --> 00:13:58,403
that undermines it at the root.
211
00:13:59,912 --> 00:14:03,764
Even Athens' most celebrated statesmen could neither account for
212
00:14:04,264 --> 00:14:06,300
the source of their virtue, so they had no idea where it came from,
213
00:14:07,295 --> 00:14:11,227
nor did they or could they pass it on to their sons. What arrived
214
00:14:11,727 --> 00:14:16,106
by instinct could not be systematically taught. As Professor Klasco
215
00:14:16,122 --> 00:14:20,198
reads it, the entire sophist vision of a citizenry
216
00:14:20,712 --> 00:14:24,146
gradually improving through education was built on a fundamental
217
00:14:24,646 --> 00:14:27,564
misunderstanding of what education can actually do.
218
00:14:28,351 --> 00:14:31,897
So at its core, it's a program that is based
219
00:14:31,946 --> 00:14:35,572
on a false premise. And once teachability
220
00:14:35,861 --> 00:14:39,536
falls that way, the entire vision falls with it.
221
00:14:39,793 --> 00:14:43,163
So having examined Socrates' position that virtue cannot be taught
222
00:14:43,663 --> 00:14:46,936
in the Meno, Another question remains, which we alluded to up front.
223
00:14:48,076 --> 00:14:51,817
If virtue cannot be reliably transmitted from one person to the
224
00:14:51,833 --> 00:14:54,948
other, then what exactly are the sophists offering?
225
00:14:56,650 --> 00:15:01,098
And what they are offering is rhetoric, the ability to persuade.
226
00:15:01,869 --> 00:15:05,144
This is their central instrument, their critics claim.
227
00:15:06,220 --> 00:15:08,837
A genuine discipline, or is it a discipline at all?
228
00:15:10,315 --> 00:15:13,977
So this is where the dialogue of Gorgias begins.
229
00:15:14,876 --> 00:15:17,527
The Gorgias was written around the same time as the Meno,
230
00:15:18,249 --> 00:15:21,879
and this places it at the heart of Plato's sustained engagement with the Sophist
231
00:15:22,379 --> 00:15:26,072
program. As Professor Dodd frames it in his landmark commentary on the dialogue,
232
00:15:26,682 --> 00:15:29,975
the Gorgias opens as a direct test of whether
233
00:15:30,055 --> 00:15:33,653
rhetoric, the art of persuasion, actually qualifies
234
00:15:33,926 --> 00:15:37,520
as a genuine techne. Or a skill. The dialogue takes its
235
00:15:38,020 --> 00:15:41,914
name from Gorgias of Leontini, and he drew students from across Greece.
236
00:15:42,090 --> 00:15:45,778
Socrates reads him as essentially an honorable
237
00:15:45,794 --> 00:15:49,722
person, master practitioner who simply never subjected
238
00:15:50,222 --> 00:15:55,222
his own craft to serious self-examination. When Socrates
239
00:15:55,318 --> 00:15:58,445
arrives, he begins to ask those questions, and the
240
00:15:58,945 --> 00:16:02,037
examination begins. So he exposes this, and it's referred to as
241
00:16:02,069 --> 00:16:04,570
the three tests. Of a genuine techne.
242
00:16:06,140 --> 00:16:09,906
Socrates, as Dodd reads it, applies 3 criteria
243
00:16:10,406 --> 00:16:13,255
to determine whether rhetoric qualifies at all as genuine techne.
244
00:16:14,152 --> 00:16:17,790
First, it must have a specific subject matter.
245
00:16:18,174 --> 00:16:21,796
So it must be about, for a skill, it must have something specific in mind.
246
00:16:22,661 --> 00:16:26,507
Two, it must aim at the genuine good of
247
00:16:26,523 --> 00:16:30,179
its objects. So in other words, it must have a beneficial
248
00:16:30,260 --> 00:16:33,827
aim. And number 3, it must be able to give an account
249
00:16:34,327 --> 00:16:37,747
of itself. So its practitioner must know
250
00:16:38,149 --> 00:16:41,443
not just how it works, but why it works. Rhetoric,
251
00:16:41,604 --> 00:16:45,299
Socrates argues, in actuality, what the
252
00:16:45,799 --> 00:16:49,927
sophists were teaching, fails on all 3 counts. He argues
253
00:16:50,843 --> 00:16:54,587
it has no specific subject matter at all. It just produces
254
00:16:54,603 --> 00:16:59,299
this quote-unquote, skill about persuasion about
255
00:16:59,508 --> 00:17:03,033
any topic at all. Number 2, it doesn't aim at
256
00:17:03,533 --> 00:17:06,942
the genuine good of its audience. It aims to flatter them and
257
00:17:07,022 --> 00:17:10,307
to persuade them to one particular point or another. And number
258
00:17:10,807 --> 00:17:13,111
3, it can't give an account of itself.
259
00:17:14,088 --> 00:17:17,357
As Professor Kerford, and he's a leading scholar of the, the Sophist
260
00:17:17,857 --> 00:17:21,827
traditions, argues, political skill was held to be something acquired
261
00:17:22,019 --> 00:17:26,149
through practice and refinement. Not genuine knowledge of what
262
00:17:26,649 --> 00:17:30,038
is good. So Plato's argument in the Gorgias targets that entire tradition,
263
00:17:31,340 --> 00:17:34,711
not just Gorgias the person himself. What rhetoric actually is,
264
00:17:34,921 --> 00:17:38,349
Socrates argues, is closer to a knack than
265
00:17:38,381 --> 00:17:41,664
a craft. It's just a way, it's a habit of producing
266
00:17:41,680 --> 00:17:45,380
flattery without any understanding of what genuinely benefits the person
267
00:17:45,477 --> 00:17:48,854
being persuaded. And the person giving it doesn't really
268
00:17:48,887 --> 00:17:52,171
believe it, or we don't know. 'cause he doesn't understand why.
269
00:17:53,582 --> 00:17:57,334
Dodge translation captions this precisely: "It is an experience-based
270
00:17:57,366 --> 00:18:02,177
practice rather than an actual techne." So based
271
00:18:02,677 --> 00:18:07,115
on this discussion, the significance of this distinction is actually quite critical because
272
00:18:07,148 --> 00:18:10,675
the sophists claimed rhetoric was the instrument of paideia,
273
00:18:11,236 --> 00:18:14,700
the skill, as we mentioned before, the skill that would
274
00:18:14,748 --> 00:18:18,613
make citizens capable of a genuine civic virtue.
275
00:18:19,639 --> 00:18:23,025
But conversely, Plato's argument is that you cannot
276
00:18:23,525 --> 00:18:26,602
build character if one has no understanding of what character even is.
277
00:18:27,019 --> 00:18:30,966
As Plato argues through Socrates, a knack for persuasion dressed
278
00:18:31,466 --> 00:18:34,785
up as moral education is not real paideia. You're not teaching
279
00:18:34,897 --> 00:18:38,827
people how to live well. And this, he claims, is the sophist
280
00:18:39,327 --> 00:18:43,207
program's major flaw. So in discussing the dialogue of
281
00:18:43,223 --> 00:18:46,450
Gorgias, Let's see how Plato uses the
282
00:18:46,950 --> 00:18:50,368
three interlocutors. And this is the most revealing aspect of the dialogue.
283
00:18:51,990 --> 00:18:55,313
Having established that rhetoric fails the test of a genuine techne,
284
00:18:55,426 --> 00:18:59,344
which we just went through the three-point plan, Plato structures
285
00:18:59,376 --> 00:19:02,555
the rest of the conversation around three successive exchanges,
286
00:19:03,213 --> 00:19:07,051
each one more candid than the last. Three figures: Gorgias,
287
00:19:08,127 --> 00:19:11,720
Polus, and probably the most controversial,
288
00:19:12,602 --> 00:19:16,514
Callicles. Each defend the use of rhetoric in attaining
289
00:19:16,611 --> 00:19:20,699
power and prestige. Together, as Professor Klosko
290
00:19:21,199 --> 00:19:24,403
reads it, they constitute Plato's portrait of what the sophist education
291
00:19:24,903 --> 00:19:28,572
program actually produces, not in theory, but how it operates in the
292
00:19:29,072 --> 00:19:32,420
real world. So Gorgias opens the dialogue claiming that rhetoric
293
00:19:32,500 --> 00:19:36,349
is the greatest of all skills, the one that gives its possessors ultimate
294
00:19:36,849 --> 00:19:39,494
power over others. Professor Dodds, however,
295
00:19:39,718 --> 00:19:42,945
reads him as essentially honorable and a
296
00:19:43,445 --> 00:19:46,653
man who has mastered his art but never seriously questioned what it was for.
297
00:19:47,006 --> 00:19:51,726
The crack that Socrates begins to work on appears
298
00:19:52,159 --> 00:19:55,852
when he asks whether rhetoric can be used to produce injustice.
299
00:19:56,317 --> 00:20:00,218
So can you use this knack of persuasion to produce
300
00:20:00,266 --> 00:20:03,958
something that's unjust? Gorgias does not
301
00:20:04,458 --> 00:20:08,277
contest this. He just simply assumes his students already know
302
00:20:08,358 --> 00:20:12,099
what is good before they arrive. Students already have a preconceived
303
00:20:12,388 --> 00:20:16,049
conception of good. Plato's point, as Dodds reads it, is that
304
00:20:16,563 --> 00:20:19,902
this assumption is the flaw in Sophist thinking
305
00:20:20,320 --> 00:20:24,334
that runs through the entire edifice of their project. If rhetoric
306
00:20:24,834 --> 00:20:28,637
is neutral, it can serve either justice or
307
00:20:28,766 --> 00:20:31,286
injustice equally. So therefore,
308
00:20:31,959 --> 00:20:35,231
it is not paideia. It is not a method by which
309
00:20:35,423 --> 00:20:38,887
to teach people to live well. It can, in some cases,
310
00:20:38,951 --> 00:20:42,255
be used as a weapon. And Gorgias and the
311
00:20:42,755 --> 00:20:46,136
sophists have been handing it over to anyone willing to pay to learn
312
00:20:46,152 --> 00:20:50,530
how to use that weapon. In his next exchange with Polus,
313
00:20:51,540 --> 00:20:54,956
who was Gorgias' student, Polus drops the pretense completely
314
00:20:55,052 --> 00:20:58,341
that his teacher maintained. Whereas Gorgias spoke
315
00:20:58,841 --> 00:21:02,899
of rhetoric in terms of its benefit to the city, Polus sees
316
00:21:02,995 --> 00:21:05,948
rhetoric strictly as a tool for attaining power.
317
00:21:06,782 --> 00:21:09,430
Justice, he positions as a constraint,
318
00:21:10,794 --> 00:21:14,373
and those who use it look at justice as a
319
00:21:14,389 --> 00:21:17,470
way of getting around it. Socrates' response, as Dodds notes,
320
00:21:17,775 --> 00:21:20,968
is the most paradoxical argument in the entire dialogue.
321
00:21:21,161 --> 00:21:24,835
So doing injustice, he proclaims, is actually worse
322
00:21:25,335 --> 00:21:28,668
than suffering it. And the tyrant, far from being the most
323
00:21:29,168 --> 00:21:31,395
enviable of men, is actually the most miserable.
324
00:21:32,678 --> 00:21:36,014
Well, this is very interesting, because now he's saying, okay, you could use this tool
325
00:21:36,142 --> 00:21:38,949
for injustice, and you will be the most miserable for it.
326
00:21:40,392 --> 00:21:44,161
So this directly inverts everything Polus values. The listener
327
00:21:44,242 --> 00:21:47,658
who has patterned the argument from the Meno will recognize the pattern.
328
00:21:48,829 --> 00:21:52,101
Socrates is not offering a competing theory of power.
329
00:21:52,470 --> 00:21:56,389
He is dismantling the very framework in which Polus' entire
330
00:21:56,501 --> 00:22:00,404
worldview rests. And that worldview holds that
331
00:22:00,533 --> 00:22:04,372
power, reputation, and the ability to act without constraint
332
00:22:04,452 --> 00:22:08,066
are the highest goods a person can possess. And now we get to
333
00:22:08,566 --> 00:22:12,468
the most controversial figure of the three: Callicles. This is Socrates'
334
00:22:12,564 --> 00:22:14,925
final interlocutor, and his most formidable.
335
00:22:16,515 --> 00:22:20,431
As Professor Klasco reads it: He is its logical
336
00:22:20,931 --> 00:22:24,183
endpoint, a man fully formed by the program,
337
00:22:24,616 --> 00:22:28,849
successful on its own terms, and one who has drawn from it the most dangerous
338
00:22:29,026 --> 00:22:32,842
conclusion possible. And that conclusion is
339
00:22:33,339 --> 00:22:37,092
that natural superiority, it not only permits domination,
340
00:22:37,445 --> 00:22:41,021
but it actually demands it. So Callicles
341
00:22:41,069 --> 00:22:44,597
is, in other words, exactly what the sophist program produces.
342
00:22:45,062 --> 00:22:48,636
At its fullest extension. So as Professor Dodd argues, this is
343
00:22:48,732 --> 00:22:52,498
a really important point to focus on here, because as Professor
344
00:22:52,998 --> 00:22:56,649
Dodd argues, Callicles' ambitions directly challenge
345
00:22:56,761 --> 00:23:00,383
Plato's most fundamental conviction, that the highest
346
00:23:00,431 --> 00:23:04,806
human good is the health and the order of the soul, and that justice
347
00:23:05,399 --> 00:23:09,951
is its expression. Callicles' worldview and his idea is
348
00:23:09,967 --> 00:23:13,717
that power and the satisfaction of the appetite replace justice
349
00:23:13,974 --> 00:23:16,315
as the highest good. So for Plato,
350
00:23:17,021 --> 00:23:21,065
that inversion is not merely wrong, it is a dangerous idea
351
00:23:21,129 --> 00:23:23,696
for a citizen of Athens to hold. Moreover,
352
00:23:24,563 --> 00:23:26,440
Callicles' vision is quite stark.
353
00:23:27,788 --> 00:23:31,414
He argued that conventional morality in general is
354
00:23:31,462 --> 00:23:34,912
a fiction invented by the weak to restrain
355
00:23:35,412 --> 00:23:39,838
the strong. So under nature's law, he positedâthe
356
00:23:39,902 --> 00:23:43,368
law of the jungle, some might sayâthe strong do not merely have
357
00:23:43,416 --> 00:23:46,625
the right to dominate, they have the obligation to do so.
358
00:23:47,426 --> 00:23:51,304
Justice, as Callicles sees it, is not a virtue; it
359
00:23:51,804 --> 00:23:55,006
is a constraint to be circumvented. Many modern scholars have
360
00:23:55,038 --> 00:23:58,643
found that Callicles' position highly significant beyond
361
00:23:59,143 --> 00:24:02,473
this dialogue itself. Professor Dodds observes that
362
00:24:02,986 --> 00:24:06,319
Gorgias is the most modern of Plato's dialogues
363
00:24:07,072 --> 00:24:10,213
because its central questions regard how
364
00:24:10,293 --> 00:24:14,027
to control the power of propaganda in a democracy and
365
00:24:14,043 --> 00:24:17,335
how to reestablish moral standards in
366
00:24:17,835 --> 00:24:21,558
a world whose traditional standards have completely disintegrated,
367
00:24:23,035 --> 00:24:27,627
and are also, he argues, the central problems of the 20th century.
368
00:24:27,675 --> 00:24:30,228
This is what Dodds is arguing. To make this case,
369
00:24:30,645 --> 00:24:33,905
he actually enlists Nietzsche, who, as Dodds documents,
370
00:24:34,435 --> 00:24:38,015
came to see in the Sophists the forerunners of his own radical
371
00:24:38,047 --> 00:24:41,225
moral skepticism. And found in Callicles
372
00:24:41,417 --> 00:24:44,915
their most compelling spokesman. As Dodd
373
00:24:44,931 --> 00:24:47,995
argues, Nietzsche's most notorious ideas were
374
00:24:48,495 --> 00:24:52,135
inspired not by the Plato who speaks through Socrates and argues
375
00:24:52,167 --> 00:24:55,665
for justice, but by the voice Plato constructed to
376
00:24:55,937 --> 00:24:59,595
oppose himself, what Dodd called the anti-Plato in
377
00:24:59,692 --> 00:25:03,382
Plato, whose persona is in Callicles. Let me just pause on
378
00:25:03,882 --> 00:25:07,313
this point for one second. So what basically Nietzsche is saying is that the most
379
00:25:07,813 --> 00:25:11,708
powerful figure from this dialogue is not the figures
380
00:25:11,724 --> 00:25:15,478
that, in this case, Socrates uses to go against Callicles,
381
00:25:15,831 --> 00:25:17,980
but the exposure of Callicles himself.
382
00:25:18,461 --> 00:25:21,285
Callicles emerges as the most dominant,
383
00:25:21,670 --> 00:25:25,520
and this, he saw, Professor Dodd saw, as a dangerous
384
00:25:26,020 --> 00:25:29,305
idea. Plato was not conflicted, he argues. He was
385
00:25:29,805 --> 00:25:32,947
strategic, giving the opposing position its most powerful
386
00:25:32,995 --> 00:25:35,433
expression precisely in order to dismantle it.
387
00:25:36,684 --> 00:25:40,262
But then Dodd goes on to say, "The strategy
388
00:25:40,358 --> 00:25:42,203
carried an unintended consequence.
389
00:25:43,567 --> 00:25:47,802
By articulating Callicles' position with such force and clarity,"
390
00:25:48,219 --> 00:25:52,005
so in other words, Plato held up Callicles so strongly and created
391
00:25:52,505 --> 00:25:55,342
him as such a, let's say, an anti-villain, if I could take that liberty,
392
00:25:56,176 --> 00:26:00,155
that through this process, that Plato inadvertently ensured
393
00:26:00,652 --> 00:26:04,326
its own survival. He ensured the words of Callicles.
394
00:26:05,466 --> 00:26:09,702
So the ideasâ this is Dodds' argumentâ the ideas
395
00:26:09,718 --> 00:26:13,055
he set out to destroy were actually preserved in his own
396
00:26:13,184 --> 00:26:15,960
words. So in summation,
397
00:26:16,698 --> 00:26:19,859
Callicles for Plato represents the final destination of the
398
00:26:19,907 --> 00:26:23,212
sophist educational program. Not the most
399
00:26:23,712 --> 00:26:26,582
capable, virtuous citizen that the sophists promised,
400
00:26:27,063 --> 00:26:30,641
but its most extreme expression. And that expression was in
401
00:26:30,674 --> 00:26:34,188
Callicles. So what Plato achieves across These three
402
00:26:34,688 --> 00:26:37,818
conversations in the Gorgias, as both Dodds and Professor Klotzko read it,
403
00:26:38,316 --> 00:26:42,187
is a dismantling of the sophist theory of civic progress
404
00:26:42,315 --> 00:26:47,343
in the most dramatic form. Each interlocutor
405
00:26:48,017 --> 00:26:51,310
is more candid than the last, with Callicles being the most extreme.
406
00:26:52,755 --> 00:26:56,369
And the gap between the sophist promise and the sophist
407
00:26:56,869 --> 00:26:59,228
product widens as the dialogue continues.
408
00:27:00,610 --> 00:27:05,446
Gorgias promised education. Polus revealed
409
00:27:05,946 --> 00:27:09,929
that ambition really was at the root. And then Callicles came
410
00:27:10,009 --> 00:27:13,319
in and confirmed that ambition unconstrained by
411
00:27:13,819 --> 00:27:18,267
justice is the program's natural destination. So while the sophists believed
412
00:27:18,364 --> 00:27:22,332
that rhetoric would make better citizens, Plato's argument
413
00:27:22,832 --> 00:27:26,365
in this dialogue staged across these three conversations is
414
00:27:26,413 --> 00:27:29,817
that it makes Callicles, and that this
415
00:27:30,042 --> 00:27:33,285
is not an accident. It is what the program was
416
00:27:33,317 --> 00:27:36,497
designed to produce. This is what Plato did,
417
00:27:37,556 --> 00:27:41,265
finally, to indict the entire sophist
418
00:27:41,765 --> 00:27:45,328
program. Well, today, across two dialogues and three interlocutors,
419
00:27:46,002 --> 00:27:49,824
Plato has done something precise and deliberate. In summation,
420
00:27:50,498 --> 00:27:54,510
in the Meno, He dismantled the Sophists' claim that virtue (aretÄ)
421
00:27:55,135 --> 00:27:58,713
can even be reliably taught by demonstrating that even
422
00:27:58,745 --> 00:28:02,130
Athens' most celebrated statesmen could neither account for the source
423
00:28:02,630 --> 00:28:05,387
of their own virtue, nor did they pass it on to their sons.
424
00:28:06,847 --> 00:28:10,472
In The Gorgias, he dismantled the instrument that the Sophists relied
425
00:28:10,972 --> 00:28:14,210
upon to teach it by showing that rhetoric, the art of persuasion,
426
00:28:14,804 --> 00:28:18,245
fails every test of a genuine craft. It is
427
00:28:18,342 --> 00:28:21,835
not techneâthat was the point of his argumentâbecause
428
00:28:21,851 --> 00:28:25,876
it has no specific subject matter, its focus is on flattery
429
00:28:25,989 --> 00:28:30,011
over goodness, and it possesses no discernible justification
430
00:28:30,059 --> 00:28:32,524
for its own use other than persuasion.
431
00:28:33,532 --> 00:28:36,835
Both attacks exposed the same confusion at the heart of the sophist
432
00:28:37,335 --> 00:28:40,846
program: the belief that technical training in rhetoric could
433
00:28:41,346 --> 00:28:45,423
substitute for genuine moral formation. So this was Plato's main
434
00:28:45,923 --> 00:28:49,598
project, and what he tried to show was that techne, or the
435
00:28:50,098 --> 00:28:53,452
appearance of techne, could not replace paideia,
436
00:28:54,094 --> 00:28:57,514
the skills of living well. What Plato leaves open through his ideas has
437
00:28:57,546 --> 00:29:00,886
significant implications regarding the notion of human progress.
438
00:29:01,014 --> 00:29:04,675
The question of what genuine civic education looks like and
439
00:29:04,755 --> 00:29:09,235
whether a pathway for moral development is possible at all still remains
440
00:29:09,412 --> 00:29:12,558
unanswered. Plato just
441
00:29:13,103 --> 00:29:17,051
took apart the entire Sophist model and showed that civic education could
442
00:29:17,551 --> 00:29:20,646
not be passed on from one to another, but yet he doesn't show us,
443
00:29:20,726 --> 00:29:24,401
well, then what is the pathway? That is the question
444
00:29:24,819 --> 00:29:28,670
in episode 8 that we will try to carry forward as we look at
445
00:29:28,911 --> 00:29:32,586
Aristotle and how he looked at this topic. Thanks for listening,
446
00:29:32,778 --> 00:29:36,004
and thanks for coming to Notions of Progress. We hope to see you
447
00:29:36,148 --> 00:29:39,807
soon, and thanks again for coming.
448
00:30:13,773 --> 00:30:20,492
Mm-hmm.
00:00:00,993 --> 00:00:04,294
Hi,
2
00:00:10,592 --> 00:00:14,534
welcome
3
00:00:15,034 --> 00:00:18,412
to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas of progress from
4
00:00:18,460 --> 00:00:20,479
antiquity to the age of AI.
5
00:00:21,905 --> 00:00:25,959
In our last episode, we looked at Plato's challenges to the Sophists' claim
6
00:00:26,456 --> 00:00:29,651
The progress is collective and cumulative, arguing,
7
00:00:29,924 --> 00:00:33,505
through the cave and through the theory of recollection, that genuine
8
00:00:33,537 --> 00:00:36,877
knowledge cannot be handed from one person to another like a package.
9
00:00:38,017 --> 00:00:41,630
We saw this most sharply in the prisoner who returns to the cave and
10
00:00:41,710 --> 00:00:43,701
cannot describe what he has seen to the others,
11
00:00:45,178 --> 00:00:49,096
and they were not able to understand it. Today we
12
00:00:49,596 --> 00:00:52,966
have followed that assault to the next target, Having challenged how the
13
00:00:53,466 --> 00:00:57,158
Sophists thought knowledge moved between people, Plato now turns
14
00:00:57,206 --> 00:01:01,302
to the two pillars that held up their entire educational program: the
15
00:01:01,802 --> 00:01:04,771
claim that virtue can be taught, and the claim that rhetoric,
16
00:01:05,333 --> 00:01:09,236
the art of persuasion, was the instrument to teach it. He further questions the
17
00:01:09,736 --> 00:01:12,802
notion of rhetoric as a craft at all, and asks what happens when
18
00:01:12,818 --> 00:01:16,496
it is mastered. He examines whether the destination it leads
19
00:01:16,996 --> 00:01:20,764
to is a civic virtue, But instead, he shows us something far darker.
20
00:01:20,988 --> 00:01:24,003
By the end of this episode, here are the key issues we will be examining:
21
00:01:24,420 --> 00:01:28,525
Why the sophists' claim to teach arete, moral excellence,
22
00:01:29,230 --> 00:01:33,448
the virtue of a good citizen, cannot, as Plato argues, withstand examination.
23
00:01:34,923 --> 00:01:38,675
Why Plato argues that the sophist educational program does not better
24
00:01:39,172 --> 00:01:42,764
citizens, but, as the dialogue the Gorgias
25
00:01:43,101 --> 00:01:45,105
reveals, something closer to the opposite.
26
00:01:46,644 --> 00:01:49,448
What the distinction between two concepts we will review today,
27
00:01:49,929 --> 00:01:53,214
paideia and techne, actually means, and why
28
00:01:53,278 --> 00:01:57,108
Plato thinks the sophists confuse the two. And lastly,
29
00:01:57,925 --> 00:02:01,594
why Plato's mission in these dialogues is, as Professor Dodds argues,
30
00:02:02,171 --> 00:02:05,761
fundamentally destructive, designed to expose the
31
00:02:05,777 --> 00:02:09,062
hollowness of the sophist enterprise completely and
32
00:02:09,562 --> 00:02:13,372
propose an alternate philosophy that is vertically oriented for the soul
33
00:02:13,725 --> 00:02:17,041
and for the individual. We'll be looking at two texts that will drive this
34
00:02:17,153 --> 00:02:20,357
episode today. In the dialogue The Meno,
35
00:02:21,335 --> 00:02:25,068
Plato asks whether virtue can actually be taught and argues through his
36
00:02:25,116 --> 00:02:28,993
examination of Athens' most celebrated statesmen that
37
00:02:29,906 --> 00:02:33,126
they didn't even possess it as knowledge, and nor did they pass it to their
38
00:02:33,626 --> 00:02:36,811
sons. In The Gorgias, he turns to rhetoric,
39
00:02:37,196 --> 00:02:40,848
the art of public persuasion through speech, and asks whether it is a genuine
40
00:02:41,025 --> 00:02:44,299
craft or just merely the ability to please a crowd.
41
00:02:45,119 --> 00:02:48,203
He follows that argument to its darkest conclusion through
42
00:02:48,703 --> 00:02:52,732
the figure of Callicles. During this episode, we will reference the following terms,
43
00:02:52,941 --> 00:02:56,121
some of which you have seen before and some of which will be new to
44
00:02:56,621 --> 00:03:00,121
you: 1. Arete: This is
45
00:03:00,137 --> 00:03:03,494
the excellence of character, the virtue a citizen needs
46
00:03:03,526 --> 00:03:05,277
to participate well in public life. 2.
47
00:03:07,140 --> 00:03:09,790
Eia: The formation of who you become.
48
00:03:10,513 --> 00:03:14,061
Education in the fullest sense of the word. It's moral, intellectual,
49
00:03:14,205 --> 00:03:17,945
and civic. Techne, a word we've seen in previous episodes,
50
00:03:18,620 --> 00:03:22,344
that means a skill or a craft, something with a clear subject
51
00:03:22,392 --> 00:03:25,811
matter, a defined aim, and the ability to explain its own reasoning.
52
00:03:25,940 --> 00:03:28,428
And the last one is brand new,
53
00:03:28,973 --> 00:03:32,794
elenchus. This is Socrates' method of cross-examination,
54
00:03:33,388 --> 00:03:36,615
a systematic process of questioning that strips away false
55
00:03:37,115 --> 00:03:40,253
certainty and drives the individual forward in search of answers.
56
00:03:41,951 --> 00:03:46,068
At the heart of this episode is a debate regarding the function of education and
57
00:03:46,568 --> 00:03:49,433
its limits. Plato argues that arete,
58
00:03:50,202 --> 00:03:53,742
genuine virtue, cannot be taught at all, and that
59
00:03:54,242 --> 00:03:58,693
the sophists, in claiming that it could, were offering technical training packaged
60
00:03:58,725 --> 00:04:02,249
as moral education. Socrates' method was systematic.
61
00:04:02,778 --> 00:04:06,302
He cross-examined anyone claiming to know what virtue was until the
62
00:04:06,802 --> 00:04:10,453
claim completely collapsed under its own weight. In The Gorgias,
63
00:04:11,287 --> 00:04:16,051
Plato further showed that the sophist educational program, taken to its
64
00:04:16,163 --> 00:04:19,740
logical extent, does not produce civic virtue
65
00:04:20,109 --> 00:04:24,311
but instead produces individuals driven by unconstrained ambition.
66
00:04:25,867 --> 00:04:29,139
Scholars including Dardes have positioned Plato here as
67
00:04:29,315 --> 00:04:32,683
clearing the ground, and he would only fill this in in later works.
68
00:04:33,966 --> 00:04:37,799
This episode follows that reading. It is about what Plato took apart
69
00:04:37,976 --> 00:04:42,078
and what he left open. So before we move forward, let me just say,
70
00:04:42,303 --> 00:04:46,005
why are we doing this? And how does this story that we're about to tell
71
00:04:46,505 --> 00:04:49,931
today relate to progress? In the last episode, we looked
72
00:04:50,431 --> 00:04:53,697
at the allegory in the cave, and we looked at two fundamental questions. The first
73
00:04:54,197 --> 00:04:57,511
one was about who could be taught, who was included in
74
00:04:57,527 --> 00:05:00,861
this group of folks that could be educated, the democratization
75
00:05:00,893 --> 00:05:04,370
of education. The second question looked at is how
76
00:05:04,435 --> 00:05:08,441
knowledge in general is accumulated, or is it accumulated across society?
77
00:05:09,019 --> 00:05:12,666
Is it a circular motion, or are societies accumulating
78
00:05:12,698 --> 00:05:16,602
knowledge and moving forward? In today's episode,
79
00:05:16,634 --> 00:05:20,329
we're going to look at Pillars 3 and 4. So these were
80
00:05:20,972 --> 00:05:24,635
arguments that Plato made against the sophists in further readings
81
00:05:24,667 --> 00:05:27,848
that we'll discuss today. And he discusses two other questions.
82
00:05:28,763 --> 00:05:31,157
First, he looks at the idea of virtue.
83
00:05:31,960 --> 00:05:35,334
Can virtue even be taught? Can we teach people to be good citizens?
84
00:05:36,474 --> 00:05:39,810
And then the second piece of this, which we'll see most clearly in The Gorgias,
85
00:05:40,484 --> 00:05:43,740
regards how does this operate in action. And this is
86
00:05:43,772 --> 00:05:47,606
a key point. You will see through the character
87
00:05:48,106 --> 00:05:53,076
that he uses, Callicles, that this is a Nietzschean kind of a character
88
00:05:53,576 --> 00:05:56,813
of sorts, and today might be looked at as a demagogue. So listen
89
00:05:56,845 --> 00:06:00,567
carefully to the argument that he puts forth against, and that he has coming from
90
00:06:00,615 --> 00:06:04,049
Callicles, and how he tries to take him down. Okay,
91
00:06:04,851 --> 00:06:09,009
so in addressing this issue, Plato wrote one of his most well-known dialogues,
92
00:06:09,041 --> 00:06:12,493
the Meno, a direct examination of whether virtue could
93
00:06:12,993 --> 00:06:16,795
be taught at all, or whether anyone, including the Sophists, actually knew what
94
00:06:16,811 --> 00:06:20,487
virtue even was. The Meno was written around
95
00:06:20,921 --> 00:06:24,870
385 BC, placing it among what scholars identify
96
00:06:25,079 --> 00:06:28,514
as Plato's transitional dialogues. These are the works that sit between
97
00:06:28,546 --> 00:06:31,613
his early examinations and the great constructive works like
98
00:06:31,677 --> 00:06:36,092
the Republic, which is well known. Guthrie situates
99
00:06:36,592 --> 00:06:41,214
this at the point where Plato begins to move beyond pure interrogation towards
100
00:06:41,714 --> 00:06:45,533
something a lot more ambitious, which makes its deliberately unresolved
101
00:06:45,710 --> 00:06:49,178
ending all the more significant. It's a short
102
00:06:49,678 --> 00:06:53,722
dialogue, a conversation between Socrates and a young Thessalian
103
00:06:54,413 --> 00:06:58,041
aristocrat named Meno, who opens with a direct question.
104
00:06:58,876 --> 00:07:02,248
Can virtue be taught? The Sophists had staked
105
00:07:02,748 --> 00:07:05,138
their entire educational program on the answer being yes.
106
00:07:06,118 --> 00:07:10,004
Their students, their fees, their standing in Athensâall
107
00:07:10,052 --> 00:07:13,873
of it rested on the claim that virtue was something that they could reliably produce
108
00:07:14,210 --> 00:07:17,197
in a person. Now, what do we mean by virtue here?
109
00:07:18,321 --> 00:07:21,580
Arete means something closer to human excellence,
110
00:07:21,773 --> 00:07:25,303
the qualities that make a person genuinely good. ânot just capable or
111
00:07:25,803 --> 00:07:28,877
clever, but just, courageous, and capable of living well.
112
00:07:30,031 --> 00:07:32,643
The sophists claim that they can produce that in a person.
113
00:07:33,220 --> 00:07:34,998
Plato's question is: Can they?
114
00:07:36,441 --> 00:07:40,399
In the Meno, Socrates opens with a carefully constructed proposition.
115
00:07:41,472 --> 00:07:44,934
He says, if virtue is a kind of knowledge, then it should be
116
00:07:45,434 --> 00:07:49,148
teachable, because knowledge, by definition, can be transmitted from one person
117
00:07:49,244 --> 00:07:52,776
to another. That is the sophist premise stated in the most
118
00:07:53,276 --> 00:07:56,149
generous form. Plato has Socrates accept it for the sake of argument,
119
00:07:56,888 --> 00:08:00,679
but then he turns it against him as we move forward. The question shifts.
120
00:08:01,610 --> 00:08:04,999
It is no longer whether virtue should be taught, or it
121
00:08:05,499 --> 00:08:08,822
becomes an empirical question. Are there actual people who can teach it,
122
00:08:09,079 --> 00:08:12,355
who are qualified to teach it? Where are the teachers?
123
00:08:13,913 --> 00:08:17,252
Socrates turns to the historical record. He examines
124
00:08:17,429 --> 00:08:20,460
Athens' most celebrated statesmen: Themistocles,
125
00:08:20,572 --> 00:08:24,148
Pericles, Thucydides, men whose public virtue
126
00:08:24,277 --> 00:08:28,190
seemed beyond question. And then he asks the question to Meno and Meno's
127
00:08:28,690 --> 00:08:32,215
companion Anytus, who was a prominent Athenian democrat
128
00:08:32,263 --> 00:08:35,615
who will later become, ironically, one of Socrates' accusers.
129
00:08:36,353 --> 00:08:39,785
He asks them, did they transmit that virtue to their sons?
130
00:08:41,100 --> 00:08:43,794
Professor Guthrie, in his careful reading of this passage,
131
00:08:43,906 --> 00:08:47,387
documents the answer the dialogue arrives at. In each case,
132
00:08:47,595 --> 00:08:51,606
no. Socrates concludes that the sons of these excellent,
133
00:08:51,670 --> 00:08:55,536
distinguished men did not inherit their fathers' excellence.
134
00:08:56,258 --> 00:08:59,707
This goes right to the issue about whether or not it could be taught,
135
00:09:00,028 --> 00:09:03,573
and if so, who would be teaching it. And this is Plato's
136
00:09:03,622 --> 00:09:06,991
first cut: the sophists claimed to teach what
137
00:09:07,071 --> 00:09:10,263
Athens' most distinguished statesmen could not pass on to their own sons.
138
00:09:11,258 --> 00:09:15,124
Plato's argument, as Guthrie reads it, is that this is not a coincidence
139
00:09:15,624 --> 00:09:19,281
or a failure of effort. It reveals something far more fundamental,
140
00:09:20,004 --> 00:09:23,295
and that is that virtue is not the kind of thing that can be
141
00:09:23,795 --> 00:09:27,116
transmitted from one person or another, regardless of who's doing the teaching.
142
00:09:27,614 --> 00:09:30,360
In other words, he argues that this cannot be taught.
143
00:09:31,162 --> 00:09:34,775
Here a sharp clarification is needed, because Plato
144
00:09:34,855 --> 00:09:39,030
is not simply on the other side of this argument from the Sophists. The Sophists
145
00:09:39,094 --> 00:09:42,161
claim to have the knowledge of virtue and how to teach it.
146
00:09:42,996 --> 00:09:45,147
Socrates claimed they had neither.
147
00:09:46,673 --> 00:09:50,077
Socrates deployed a method, as we discussed earlier, known as
148
00:09:50,093 --> 00:09:53,803
the lynchus. And this is a process of systematic
149
00:09:54,303 --> 00:09:58,540
cross-examination. As Professor Weiss, a contemporary scholar
150
00:09:59,040 --> 00:10:02,282
of Plato, argues, this rigorous process of cross-examination
151
00:10:02,314 --> 00:10:05,735
does not deliver virtue; it delivers the recognition
152
00:10:05,927 --> 00:10:09,476
of ignorance. She says this in the best of senses.
153
00:10:10,263 --> 00:10:14,599
And that recognition, Professor Weiss contends, is itself
154
00:10:14,743 --> 00:10:18,228
a form of wisdom. Only those who understand the limits
155
00:10:18,276 --> 00:10:21,953
of what they know are capable of genuinely seeking
156
00:10:22,210 --> 00:10:25,374
what they do not. So this is a kind of humility about what
157
00:10:25,422 --> 00:10:28,617
we know and what we can know. Ignorance,
158
00:10:28,794 --> 00:10:31,717
therefore, is not the opposite of knowledge,
159
00:10:32,423 --> 00:10:35,795
but actually the doorway to it. So while the sophists were
160
00:10:36,295 --> 00:10:40,452
boosting their students' confidence, Socrates was engaged in a process
161
00:10:40,952 --> 00:10:44,002
designed to help his interlocutor recognize how little they actually knew.
162
00:10:45,431 --> 00:10:49,189
As Professor Guthrie reads it, "The sophist's promise to teach virtue
163
00:10:49,205 --> 00:10:52,465
was not just overconfident; it was built on a foundation
164
00:10:52,562 --> 00:10:56,079
that just could not last." So
165
00:10:56,175 --> 00:11:00,094
what does Plato conclude from all of this? Well, not that
166
00:11:00,190 --> 00:11:04,028
virtue is impossible, but something actually far more unsettling.
167
00:11:05,185 --> 00:11:08,960
He concludes that what passes for virtue in public
168
00:11:09,460 --> 00:11:12,864
life actually is merely true opinion,
169
00:11:13,378 --> 00:11:16,993
and it's not knowledge. True opinion, as Socrates describes
170
00:11:17,493 --> 00:11:21,299
in the Meno, is a correct belief that a person holds
171
00:11:21,492 --> 00:11:24,689
without being able to explain why it is correct. So you
172
00:11:25,189 --> 00:11:29,155
have a belief, sometimes it's actually correct, but you have no idea why it exists.
173
00:11:29,508 --> 00:11:33,523
It comes to us through instinct, upbringing, habit, or what
174
00:11:34,023 --> 00:11:36,878
Socrates calls pointedly, divine dispensation.
175
00:11:38,275 --> 00:11:41,566
So we may act rightly on the basis of it, but we can't
176
00:11:42,066 --> 00:11:45,242
teach it, can't defend it under questioning, and we can't
177
00:11:45,742 --> 00:11:49,865
pass it on to anybody reliably because we don't truly understand why
178
00:11:49,929 --> 00:11:54,103
it exists in the first place. So he's kind of describing here the idea
179
00:11:54,167 --> 00:11:57,763
of a belief that you hold, that you carry through, that you've acquired through
180
00:11:58,263 --> 00:12:01,876
habit, through social norms, and you've never really looked at why it exists or
181
00:12:02,376 --> 00:12:05,957
be able to justify it. But sometimes it turns out to be the quote unquote
182
00:12:05,973 --> 00:12:09,428
correct way of being. So, for example,
183
00:12:09,749 --> 00:12:13,268
he raises, a person could hold a strong opinion about the right road
184
00:12:13,768 --> 00:12:16,433
to take, but not knowing why it's the right road to take.
185
00:12:18,024 --> 00:12:21,575
And they may arrive at this destination as somebody who
186
00:12:21,623 --> 00:12:24,226
does, who actually does know why.
187
00:12:25,575 --> 00:12:28,979
The difference is, if the road conditions change and someone
188
00:12:29,171 --> 00:12:32,286
asks that person their reasoning, if they don't have it,
189
00:12:33,121 --> 00:12:36,156
the person with knowledge will be the one who will be able to guide and
190
00:12:36,253 --> 00:12:39,833
navigate a new path. The person who is only existing
191
00:12:40,106 --> 00:12:43,735
on true opinion is lost. So this,
192
00:12:43,960 --> 00:12:47,251
as Professor Weiss carefully argues, is precisely the
193
00:12:47,751 --> 00:12:51,956
problem with what the sophists were producing. Their students could not give reasons
194
00:12:51,988 --> 00:12:55,357
for themselves. And true opinion, she argues, cannot be
195
00:12:55,857 --> 00:12:58,950
reliably passed on precisely because it carries no account of itself.
196
00:12:59,687 --> 00:13:03,136
It just wanders. The sophists were not producing citizens capable
197
00:13:03,636 --> 00:13:07,354
of genuine moral reasoning. They were instead producing individuals
198
00:13:07,690 --> 00:13:10,305
who could perform virtue, or the look of virtue,
199
00:13:11,235 --> 00:13:13,272
until the moment Socrates asked them why.
200
00:13:15,004 --> 00:13:18,532
That is not civic virtue, according to Socrates. That is the
201
00:13:19,032 --> 00:13:22,959
appearance of virtue. So what Plato achieves in the Meno goes to
202
00:13:23,459 --> 00:13:27,371
the heart of the Sophist vision of civic progress. As both Guthrie
203
00:13:27,980 --> 00:13:31,638
and Professor George Klosko, a contemporary scholar of ancient
204
00:13:31,767 --> 00:13:35,906
political philosophy, argue, he dismantles the intellectual foundation
205
00:13:36,002 --> 00:13:40,254
on which that vision rested. The Sophists believed
206
00:13:40,754 --> 00:13:44,521
that citizens could become more just, capable, and virtuous through
207
00:13:44,666 --> 00:13:47,843
education. This is the cornerstone of their whole program.
208
00:13:48,854 --> 00:13:52,465
That belief rested entirely on the claim that virtue was
209
00:13:52,529 --> 00:13:56,445
teachable. But Socrates' examination reveals something
210
00:13:56,477 --> 00:13:58,403
that undermines it at the root.
211
00:13:59,912 --> 00:14:03,764
Even Athens' most celebrated statesmen could neither account for
212
00:14:04,264 --> 00:14:06,300
the source of their virtue, so they had no idea where it came from,
213
00:14:07,295 --> 00:14:11,227
nor did they or could they pass it on to their sons. What arrived
214
00:14:11,727 --> 00:14:16,106
by instinct could not be systematically taught. As Professor Klasco
215
00:14:16,122 --> 00:14:20,198
reads it, the entire sophist vision of a citizenry
216
00:14:20,712 --> 00:14:24,146
gradually improving through education was built on a fundamental
217
00:14:24,646 --> 00:14:27,564
misunderstanding of what education can actually do.
218
00:14:28,351 --> 00:14:31,897
So at its core, it's a program that is based
219
00:14:31,946 --> 00:14:35,572
on a false premise. And once teachability
220
00:14:35,861 --> 00:14:39,536
falls that way, the entire vision falls with it.
221
00:14:39,793 --> 00:14:43,163
So having examined Socrates' position that virtue cannot be taught
222
00:14:43,663 --> 00:14:46,936
in the Meno, Another question remains, which we alluded to up front.
223
00:14:48,076 --> 00:14:51,817
If virtue cannot be reliably transmitted from one person to the
224
00:14:51,833 --> 00:14:54,948
other, then what exactly are the sophists offering?
225
00:14:56,650 --> 00:15:01,098
And what they are offering is rhetoric, the ability to persuade.
226
00:15:01,869 --> 00:15:05,144
This is their central instrument, their critics claim.
227
00:15:06,220 --> 00:15:08,837
A genuine discipline, or is it a discipline at all?
228
00:15:10,315 --> 00:15:13,977
So this is where the dialogue of Gorgias begins.
229
00:15:14,876 --> 00:15:17,527
The Gorgias was written around the same time as the Meno,
230
00:15:18,249 --> 00:15:21,879
and this places it at the heart of Plato's sustained engagement with the Sophist
231
00:15:22,379 --> 00:15:26,072
program. As Professor Dodd frames it in his landmark commentary on the dialogue,
232
00:15:26,682 --> 00:15:29,975
the Gorgias opens as a direct test of whether
233
00:15:30,055 --> 00:15:33,653
rhetoric, the art of persuasion, actually qualifies
234
00:15:33,926 --> 00:15:37,520
as a genuine techne. Or a skill. The dialogue takes its
235
00:15:38,020 --> 00:15:41,914
name from Gorgias of Leontini, and he drew students from across Greece.
236
00:15:42,090 --> 00:15:45,778
Socrates reads him as essentially an honorable
237
00:15:45,794 --> 00:15:49,722
person, master practitioner who simply never subjected
238
00:15:50,222 --> 00:15:55,222
his own craft to serious self-examination. When Socrates
239
00:15:55,318 --> 00:15:58,445
arrives, he begins to ask those questions, and the
240
00:15:58,945 --> 00:16:02,037
examination begins. So he exposes this, and it's referred to as
241
00:16:02,069 --> 00:16:04,570
the three tests. Of a genuine techne.
242
00:16:06,140 --> 00:16:09,906
Socrates, as Dodd reads it, applies 3 criteria
243
00:16:10,406 --> 00:16:13,255
to determine whether rhetoric qualifies at all as genuine techne.
244
00:16:14,152 --> 00:16:17,790
First, it must have a specific subject matter.
245
00:16:18,174 --> 00:16:21,796
So it must be about, for a skill, it must have something specific in mind.
246
00:16:22,661 --> 00:16:26,507
Two, it must aim at the genuine good of
247
00:16:26,523 --> 00:16:30,179
its objects. So in other words, it must have a beneficial
248
00:16:30,260 --> 00:16:33,827
aim. And number 3, it must be able to give an account
249
00:16:34,327 --> 00:16:37,747
of itself. So its practitioner must know
250
00:16:38,149 --> 00:16:41,443
not just how it works, but why it works. Rhetoric,
251
00:16:41,604 --> 00:16:45,299
Socrates argues, in actuality, what the
252
00:16:45,799 --> 00:16:49,927
sophists were teaching, fails on all 3 counts. He argues
253
00:16:50,843 --> 00:16:54,587
it has no specific subject matter at all. It just produces
254
00:16:54,603 --> 00:16:59,299
this quote-unquote, skill about persuasion about
255
00:16:59,508 --> 00:17:03,033
any topic at all. Number 2, it doesn't aim at
256
00:17:03,533 --> 00:17:06,942
the genuine good of its audience. It aims to flatter them and
257
00:17:07,022 --> 00:17:10,307
to persuade them to one particular point or another. And number
258
00:17:10,807 --> 00:17:13,111
3, it can't give an account of itself.
259
00:17:14,088 --> 00:17:17,357
As Professor Kerford, and he's a leading scholar of the, the Sophist
260
00:17:17,857 --> 00:17:21,827
traditions, argues, political skill was held to be something acquired
261
00:17:22,019 --> 00:17:26,149
through practice and refinement. Not genuine knowledge of what
262
00:17:26,649 --> 00:17:30,038
is good. So Plato's argument in the Gorgias targets that entire tradition,
263
00:17:31,340 --> 00:17:34,711
not just Gorgias the person himself. What rhetoric actually is,
264
00:17:34,921 --> 00:17:38,349
Socrates argues, is closer to a knack than
265
00:17:38,381 --> 00:17:41,664
a craft. It's just a way, it's a habit of producing
266
00:17:41,680 --> 00:17:45,380
flattery without any understanding of what genuinely benefits the person
267
00:17:45,477 --> 00:17:48,854
being persuaded. And the person giving it doesn't really
268
00:17:48,887 --> 00:17:52,171
believe it, or we don't know. 'cause he doesn't understand why.
269
00:17:53,582 --> 00:17:57,334
Dodge translation captions this precisely: "It is an experience-based
270
00:17:57,366 --> 00:18:02,177
practice rather than an actual techne." So based
271
00:18:02,677 --> 00:18:07,115
on this discussion, the significance of this distinction is actually quite critical because
272
00:18:07,148 --> 00:18:10,675
the sophists claimed rhetoric was the instrument of paideia,
273
00:18:11,236 --> 00:18:14,700
the skill, as we mentioned before, the skill that would
274
00:18:14,748 --> 00:18:18,613
make citizens capable of a genuine civic virtue.
275
00:18:19,639 --> 00:18:23,025
But conversely, Plato's argument is that you cannot
276
00:18:23,525 --> 00:18:26,602
build character if one has no understanding of what character even is.
277
00:18:27,019 --> 00:18:30,966
As Plato argues through Socrates, a knack for persuasion dressed
278
00:18:31,466 --> 00:18:34,785
up as moral education is not real paideia. You're not teaching
279
00:18:34,897 --> 00:18:38,827
people how to live well. And this, he claims, is the sophist
280
00:18:39,327 --> 00:18:43,207
program's major flaw. So in discussing the dialogue of
281
00:18:43,223 --> 00:18:46,450
Gorgias, Let's see how Plato uses the
282
00:18:46,950 --> 00:18:50,368
three interlocutors. And this is the most revealing aspect of the dialogue.
283
00:18:51,990 --> 00:18:55,313
Having established that rhetoric fails the test of a genuine techne,
284
00:18:55,426 --> 00:18:59,344
which we just went through the three-point plan, Plato structures
285
00:18:59,376 --> 00:19:02,555
the rest of the conversation around three successive exchanges,
286
00:19:03,213 --> 00:19:07,051
each one more candid than the last. Three figures: Gorgias,
287
00:19:08,127 --> 00:19:11,720
Polus, and probably the most controversial,
288
00:19:12,602 --> 00:19:16,514
Callicles. Each defend the use of rhetoric in attaining
289
00:19:16,611 --> 00:19:20,699
power and prestige. Together, as Professor Klosko
290
00:19:21,199 --> 00:19:24,403
reads it, they constitute Plato's portrait of what the sophist education
291
00:19:24,903 --> 00:19:28,572
program actually produces, not in theory, but how it operates in the
292
00:19:29,072 --> 00:19:32,420
real world. So Gorgias opens the dialogue claiming that rhetoric
293
00:19:32,500 --> 00:19:36,349
is the greatest of all skills, the one that gives its possessors ultimate
294
00:19:36,849 --> 00:19:39,494
power over others. Professor Dodds, however,
295
00:19:39,718 --> 00:19:42,945
reads him as essentially honorable and a
296
00:19:43,445 --> 00:19:46,653
man who has mastered his art but never seriously questioned what it was for.
297
00:19:47,006 --> 00:19:51,726
The crack that Socrates begins to work on appears
298
00:19:52,159 --> 00:19:55,852
when he asks whether rhetoric can be used to produce injustice.
299
00:19:56,317 --> 00:20:00,218
So can you use this knack of persuasion to produce
300
00:20:00,266 --> 00:20:03,958
something that's unjust? Gorgias does not
301
00:20:04,458 --> 00:20:08,277
contest this. He just simply assumes his students already know
302
00:20:08,358 --> 00:20:12,099
what is good before they arrive. Students already have a preconceived
303
00:20:12,388 --> 00:20:16,049
conception of good. Plato's point, as Dodds reads it, is that
304
00:20:16,563 --> 00:20:19,902
this assumption is the flaw in Sophist thinking
305
00:20:20,320 --> 00:20:24,334
that runs through the entire edifice of their project. If rhetoric
306
00:20:24,834 --> 00:20:28,637
is neutral, it can serve either justice or
307
00:20:28,766 --> 00:20:31,286
injustice equally. So therefore,
308
00:20:31,959 --> 00:20:35,231
it is not paideia. It is not a method by which
309
00:20:35,423 --> 00:20:38,887
to teach people to live well. It can, in some cases,
310
00:20:38,951 --> 00:20:42,255
be used as a weapon. And Gorgias and the
311
00:20:42,755 --> 00:20:46,136
sophists have been handing it over to anyone willing to pay to learn
312
00:20:46,152 --> 00:20:50,530
how to use that weapon. In his next exchange with Polus,
313
00:20:51,540 --> 00:20:54,956
who was Gorgias' student, Polus drops the pretense completely
314
00:20:55,052 --> 00:20:58,341
that his teacher maintained. Whereas Gorgias spoke
315
00:20:58,841 --> 00:21:02,899
of rhetoric in terms of its benefit to the city, Polus sees
316
00:21:02,995 --> 00:21:05,948
rhetoric strictly as a tool for attaining power.
317
00:21:06,782 --> 00:21:09,430
Justice, he positions as a constraint,
318
00:21:10,794 --> 00:21:14,373
and those who use it look at justice as a
319
00:21:14,389 --> 00:21:17,470
way of getting around it. Socrates' response, as Dodds notes,
320
00:21:17,775 --> 00:21:20,968
is the most paradoxical argument in the entire dialogue.
321
00:21:21,161 --> 00:21:24,835
So doing injustice, he proclaims, is actually worse
322
00:21:25,335 --> 00:21:28,668
than suffering it. And the tyrant, far from being the most
323
00:21:29,168 --> 00:21:31,395
enviable of men, is actually the most miserable.
324
00:21:32,678 --> 00:21:36,014
Well, this is very interesting, because now he's saying, okay, you could use this tool
325
00:21:36,142 --> 00:21:38,949
for injustice, and you will be the most miserable for it.
326
00:21:40,392 --> 00:21:44,161
So this directly inverts everything Polus values. The listener
327
00:21:44,242 --> 00:21:47,658
who has patterned the argument from the Meno will recognize the pattern.
328
00:21:48,829 --> 00:21:52,101
Socrates is not offering a competing theory of power.
329
00:21:52,470 --> 00:21:56,389
He is dismantling the very framework in which Polus' entire
330
00:21:56,501 --> 00:22:00,404
worldview rests. And that worldview holds that
331
00:22:00,533 --> 00:22:04,372
power, reputation, and the ability to act without constraint
332
00:22:04,452 --> 00:22:08,066
are the highest goods a person can possess. And now we get to
333
00:22:08,566 --> 00:22:12,468
the most controversial figure of the three: Callicles. This is Socrates'
334
00:22:12,564 --> 00:22:14,925
final interlocutor, and his most formidable.
335
00:22:16,515 --> 00:22:20,431
As Professor Klasco reads it: He is its logical
336
00:22:20,931 --> 00:22:24,183
endpoint, a man fully formed by the program,
337
00:22:24,616 --> 00:22:28,849
successful on its own terms, and one who has drawn from it the most dangerous
338
00:22:29,026 --> 00:22:32,842
conclusion possible. And that conclusion is
339
00:22:33,339 --> 00:22:37,092
that natural superiority, it not only permits domination,
340
00:22:37,445 --> 00:22:41,021
but it actually demands it. So Callicles
341
00:22:41,069 --> 00:22:44,597
is, in other words, exactly what the sophist program produces.
342
00:22:45,062 --> 00:22:48,636
At its fullest extension. So as Professor Dodd argues, this is
343
00:22:48,732 --> 00:22:52,498
a really important point to focus on here, because as Professor
344
00:22:52,998 --> 00:22:56,649
Dodd argues, Callicles' ambitions directly challenge
345
00:22:56,761 --> 00:23:00,383
Plato's most fundamental conviction, that the highest
346
00:23:00,431 --> 00:23:04,806
human good is the health and the order of the soul, and that justice
347
00:23:05,399 --> 00:23:09,951
is its expression. Callicles' worldview and his idea is
348
00:23:09,967 --> 00:23:13,717
that power and the satisfaction of the appetite replace justice
349
00:23:13,974 --> 00:23:16,315
as the highest good. So for Plato,
350
00:23:17,021 --> 00:23:21,065
that inversion is not merely wrong, it is a dangerous idea
351
00:23:21,129 --> 00:23:23,696
for a citizen of Athens to hold. Moreover,
352
00:23:24,563 --> 00:23:26,440
Callicles' vision is quite stark.
353
00:23:27,788 --> 00:23:31,414
He argued that conventional morality in general is
354
00:23:31,462 --> 00:23:34,912
a fiction invented by the weak to restrain
355
00:23:35,412 --> 00:23:39,838
the strong. So under nature's law, he positedâthe
356
00:23:39,902 --> 00:23:43,368
law of the jungle, some might sayâthe strong do not merely have
357
00:23:43,416 --> 00:23:46,625
the right to dominate, they have the obligation to do so.
358
00:23:47,426 --> 00:23:51,304
Justice, as Callicles sees it, is not a virtue; it
359
00:23:51,804 --> 00:23:55,006
is a constraint to be circumvented. Many modern scholars have
360
00:23:55,038 --> 00:23:58,643
found that Callicles' position highly significant beyond
361
00:23:59,143 --> 00:24:02,473
this dialogue itself. Professor Dodds observes that
362
00:24:02,986 --> 00:24:06,319
Gorgias is the most modern of Plato's dialogues
363
00:24:07,072 --> 00:24:10,213
because its central questions regard how
364
00:24:10,293 --> 00:24:14,027
to control the power of propaganda in a democracy and
365
00:24:14,043 --> 00:24:17,335
how to reestablish moral standards in
366
00:24:17,835 --> 00:24:21,558
a world whose traditional standards have completely disintegrated,
367
00:24:23,035 --> 00:24:27,627
and are also, he argues, the central problems of the 20th century.
368
00:24:27,675 --> 00:24:30,228
This is what Dodds is arguing. To make this case,
369
00:24:30,645 --> 00:24:33,905
he actually enlists Nietzsche, who, as Dodds documents,
370
00:24:34,435 --> 00:24:38,015
came to see in the Sophists the forerunners of his own radical
371
00:24:38,047 --> 00:24:41,225
moral skepticism. And found in Callicles
372
00:24:41,417 --> 00:24:44,915
their most compelling spokesman. As Dodd
373
00:24:44,931 --> 00:24:47,995
argues, Nietzsche's most notorious ideas were
374
00:24:48,495 --> 00:24:52,135
inspired not by the Plato who speaks through Socrates and argues
375
00:24:52,167 --> 00:24:55,665
for justice, but by the voice Plato constructed to
376
00:24:55,937 --> 00:24:59,595
oppose himself, what Dodd called the anti-Plato in
377
00:24:59,692 --> 00:25:03,382
Plato, whose persona is in Callicles. Let me just pause on
378
00:25:03,882 --> 00:25:07,313
this point for one second. So what basically Nietzsche is saying is that the most
379
00:25:07,813 --> 00:25:11,708
powerful figure from this dialogue is not the figures
380
00:25:11,724 --> 00:25:15,478
that, in this case, Socrates uses to go against Callicles,
381
00:25:15,831 --> 00:25:17,980
but the exposure of Callicles himself.
382
00:25:18,461 --> 00:25:21,285
Callicles emerges as the most dominant,
383
00:25:21,670 --> 00:25:25,520
and this, he saw, Professor Dodd saw, as a dangerous
384
00:25:26,020 --> 00:25:29,305
idea. Plato was not conflicted, he argues. He was
385
00:25:29,805 --> 00:25:32,947
strategic, giving the opposing position its most powerful
386
00:25:32,995 --> 00:25:35,433
expression precisely in order to dismantle it.
387
00:25:36,684 --> 00:25:40,262
But then Dodd goes on to say, "The strategy
388
00:25:40,358 --> 00:25:42,203
carried an unintended consequence.
389
00:25:43,567 --> 00:25:47,802
By articulating Callicles' position with such force and clarity,"
390
00:25:48,219 --> 00:25:52,005
so in other words, Plato held up Callicles so strongly and created
391
00:25:52,505 --> 00:25:55,342
him as such a, let's say, an anti-villain, if I could take that liberty,
392
00:25:56,176 --> 00:26:00,155
that through this process, that Plato inadvertently ensured
393
00:26:00,652 --> 00:26:04,326
its own survival. He ensured the words of Callicles.
394
00:26:05,466 --> 00:26:09,702
So the ideasâ this is Dodds' argumentâ the ideas
395
00:26:09,718 --> 00:26:13,055
he set out to destroy were actually preserved in his own
396
00:26:13,184 --> 00:26:15,960
words. So in summation,
397
00:26:16,698 --> 00:26:19,859
Callicles for Plato represents the final destination of the
398
00:26:19,907 --> 00:26:23,212
sophist educational program. Not the most
399
00:26:23,712 --> 00:26:26,582
capable, virtuous citizen that the sophists promised,
400
00:26:27,063 --> 00:26:30,641
but its most extreme expression. And that expression was in
401
00:26:30,674 --> 00:26:34,188
Callicles. So what Plato achieves across These three
402
00:26:34,688 --> 00:26:37,818
conversations in the Gorgias, as both Dodds and Professor Klotzko read it,
403
00:26:38,316 --> 00:26:42,187
is a dismantling of the sophist theory of civic progress
404
00:26:42,315 --> 00:26:47,343
in the most dramatic form. Each interlocutor
405
00:26:48,017 --> 00:26:51,310
is more candid than the last, with Callicles being the most extreme.
406
00:26:52,755 --> 00:26:56,369
And the gap between the sophist promise and the sophist
407
00:26:56,869 --> 00:26:59,228
product widens as the dialogue continues.
408
00:27:00,610 --> 00:27:05,446
Gorgias promised education. Polus revealed
409
00:27:05,946 --> 00:27:09,929
that ambition really was at the root. And then Callicles came
410
00:27:10,009 --> 00:27:13,319
in and confirmed that ambition unconstrained by
411
00:27:13,819 --> 00:27:18,267
justice is the program's natural destination. So while the sophists believed
412
00:27:18,364 --> 00:27:22,332
that rhetoric would make better citizens, Plato's argument
413
00:27:22,832 --> 00:27:26,365
in this dialogue staged across these three conversations is
414
00:27:26,413 --> 00:27:29,817
that it makes Callicles, and that this
415
00:27:30,042 --> 00:27:33,285
is not an accident. It is what the program was
416
00:27:33,317 --> 00:27:36,497
designed to produce. This is what Plato did,
417
00:27:37,556 --> 00:27:41,265
finally, to indict the entire sophist
418
00:27:41,765 --> 00:27:45,328
program. Well, today, across two dialogues and three interlocutors,
419
00:27:46,002 --> 00:27:49,824
Plato has done something precise and deliberate. In summation,
420
00:27:50,498 --> 00:27:54,510
in the Meno, He dismantled the Sophists' claim that virtue (aretÄ)
421
00:27:55,135 --> 00:27:58,713
can even be reliably taught by demonstrating that even
422
00:27:58,745 --> 00:28:02,130
Athens' most celebrated statesmen could neither account for the source
423
00:28:02,630 --> 00:28:05,387
of their own virtue, nor did they pass it on to their sons.
424
00:28:06,847 --> 00:28:10,472
In The Gorgias, he dismantled the instrument that the Sophists relied
425
00:28:10,972 --> 00:28:14,210
upon to teach it by showing that rhetoric, the art of persuasion,
426
00:28:14,804 --> 00:28:18,245
fails every test of a genuine craft. It is
427
00:28:18,342 --> 00:28:21,835
not techneâthat was the point of his argumentâbecause
428
00:28:21,851 --> 00:28:25,876
it has no specific subject matter, its focus is on flattery
429
00:28:25,989 --> 00:28:30,011
over goodness, and it possesses no discernible justification
430
00:28:30,059 --> 00:28:32,524
for its own use other than persuasion.
431
00:28:33,532 --> 00:28:36,835
Both attacks exposed the same confusion at the heart of the sophist
432
00:28:37,335 --> 00:28:40,846
program: the belief that technical training in rhetoric could
433
00:28:41,346 --> 00:28:45,423
substitute for genuine moral formation. So this was Plato's main
434
00:28:45,923 --> 00:28:49,598
project, and what he tried to show was that techne, or the
435
00:28:50,098 --> 00:28:53,452
appearance of techne, could not replace paideia,
436
00:28:54,094 --> 00:28:57,514
the skills of living well. What Plato leaves open through his ideas has
437
00:28:57,546 --> 00:29:00,886
significant implications regarding the notion of human progress.
438
00:29:01,014 --> 00:29:04,675
The question of what genuine civic education looks like and
439
00:29:04,755 --> 00:29:09,235
whether a pathway for moral development is possible at all still remains
440
00:29:09,412 --> 00:29:12,558
unanswered. Plato just
441
00:29:13,103 --> 00:29:17,051
took apart the entire Sophist model and showed that civic education could
442
00:29:17,551 --> 00:29:20,646
not be passed on from one to another, but yet he doesn't show us,
443
00:29:20,726 --> 00:29:24,401
well, then what is the pathway? That is the question
444
00:29:24,819 --> 00:29:28,670
in episode 8 that we will try to carry forward as we look at
445
00:29:28,911 --> 00:29:32,586
Aristotle and how he looked at this topic. Thanks for listening,
446
00:29:32,778 --> 00:29:36,004
and thanks for coming to Notions of Progress. We hope to see you
447
00:29:36,148 --> 00:29:39,807
soon, and thanks again for coming.
448
00:30:13,773 --> 00:30:20,492
Mm-hmm.
