Plato vs. the Sophists: Rhetoric, Power, and the Making of Callicles | Ep. 7 pt 2

0:00 Hi, welcome to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of AI. In our last episode, we looked at Plato's challenges to the Sophists' claim The progress is collective and cumulative, arguing, through the cave and through the theory of recollection, that genuine knowledge cannot be handed from one person to another like a package. We saw this most sharply in the prisoner who returns to the cave and cannot describe what he has seen to the others, and they were not able to understand it. Today we have followed that assault to the next target, Having challenged how the Sophists thought knowledge moved between people, Plato now turns to the two pillars that held up their entire educational program: the claim that virtue can be taught, and the claim that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was the instrument to teach it. He further questions the notion of rhetoric as a craft at all, and asks what happens when it is mastered. He examines whether the destination it leads to is a civic virtue, But instead, he shows us something far darker.

1:20 By the end of this episode, here are the key issues we will be examining: Why the sophists' claim to teach arete, moral excellence, the virtue of a good citizen, cannot, as Plato argues, withstand examination. Why Plato argues that the sophist educational program does not better citizens, but, as the dialogue the Gorgias reveals, something closer to the opposite. What the distinction between two concepts we will review today, paideia and techne, actually means, and why Plato thinks the sophists confuse the two. And lastly, why Plato's mission in these dialogues is, as Professor Dodds argues, fundamentally destructive, designed to expose the hollowness of the sophist enterprise completely and propose an alternate philosophy that is vertically oriented for the soul and for the individual. We'll be looking at two texts that will drive this episode today. In the dialogue The Meno, Plato asks whether virtue can actually be taught and argues through his examination of Athens' most celebrated statesmen that they didn't even possess it as knowledge, and nor did they pass it to their sons. In The Gorgias, he turns to rhetoric, the art of public persuasion through speech, and asks whether it is a genuine craft or just merely the ability to please a crowd.

2:45 He follows that argument to its darkest conclusion through the figure of Callicles. During this episode, we will reference the following terms, some of which you have seen before and some of which will be new to you: 1. Arete: This is the excellence of character, the virtue a citizen needs to participate well in public life. 2. Eia: The formation of who you become. Education in the fullest sense of the word. It's moral, intellectual, and civic. Techne, a word we've seen in previous episodes, that means a skill or a craft, something with a clear subject matter, a defined aim, and the ability to explain its own reasoning.

3:25 And the last one is brand new, elenchus. This is Socrates' method of cross-examination, a systematic process of questioning that strips away false certainty and drives the individual forward in search of answers. At the heart of this episode is a debate regarding the function of education and its limits. Plato argues that arete, genuine virtue, cannot be taught at all, and that the sophists, in claiming that it could, were offering technical training packaged as moral education. Socrates' method was systematic. He cross-examined anyone claiming to know what virtue was until the claim completely collapsed under its own weight. In The Gorgias, Plato further showed that the sophist educational program, taken to its logical extent, does not produce civic virtue but instead produces individuals driven by unconstrained ambition.

4:25 Scholars including Dardes have positioned Plato here as clearing the ground, and he would only fill this in in later works. This episode follows that reading. It is about what Plato took apart and what he left open. So before we move forward, let me just say, why are we doing this? And how does this story that we're about to tell today relate to progress? In the last episode, we looked at the allegory in the cave, and we looked at two fundamental questions. The first one was about who could be taught, who was included in this group of folks that could be educated, the democratization of education. The second question looked at is how knowledge in general is accumulated, or is it accumulated across society?

5:09 Is it a circular motion, or are societies accumulating knowledge and moving forward? In today's episode, we're going to look at Pillars 3 and 4. So these were arguments that Plato made against the sophists in further readings that we'll discuss today. And he discusses two other questions. First, he looks at the idea of virtue. Can virtue even be taught? Can we teach people to be good citizens? And then the second piece of this, which we'll see most clearly in The Gorgias, regards how does this operate in action. And this is a key point. You will see through the character that he uses, Callicles, that this is a Nietzschean kind of a character of sorts, and today might be looked at as a demagogue. So listen carefully to the argument that he puts forth against, and that he has coming from Callicles, and how he tries to take him down. Okay, so in addressing this issue, Plato wrote one of his most well-known dialogues, the Meno, a direct examination of whether virtue could be taught at all, or whether anyone, including the Sophists, actually knew what virtue even was. The Meno was written around 385 BC, placing it among what scholars identify as Plato's transitional dialogues. These are the works that sit between his early examinations and the great constructive works like the Republic, which is well known. Guthrie situates this at the point where Plato begins to move beyond pure interrogation towards

6:41 something a lot more ambitious, which makes its deliberately unresolved ending all the more significant. It's a short dialogue, a conversation between Socrates and a young Thessalian aristocrat named Meno, who opens with a direct question. Can virtue be taught? The Sophists had staked their entire educational program on the answer being yes. Their students, their fees, their standing in Athens—all of it rested on the claim that virtue was something that they could reliably produce in a person. Now, what do we mean by virtue here? Arete means something closer to human excellence, the qualities that make a person genuinely good. —not just capable or clever, but just, courageous, and capable of living well.

7:30 The sophists claim that they can produce that in a person. Plato's question is: Can they? In the Meno, Socrates opens with a carefully constructed proposition. He says, if virtue is a kind of knowledge, then it should be teachable, because knowledge, by definition, can be transmitted from one person to another. That is the sophist premise stated in the most generous form. Plato has Socrates accept it for the sake of argument, but then he turns it against him as we move forward. The question shifts. It is no longer whether virtue should be taught, or it becomes an empirical question. Are there actual people who can teach it, who are qualified to teach it? Where are the teachers?

8:13 Socrates turns to the historical record. He examines Athens' most celebrated statesmen: Themistocles, Pericles, Thucydides, men whose public virtue seemed beyond question. And then he asks the question to Meno and Meno's companion Anytus, who was a prominent Athenian democrat who will later become, ironically, one of Socrates' accusers. He asks them, did they transmit that virtue to their sons? Professor Guthrie, in his careful reading of this passage, documents the answer the dialogue arrives at. In each case, no. Socrates concludes that the sons of these excellent, distinguished men did not inherit their fathers' excellence.

8:56 This goes right to the issue about whether or not it could be taught, and if so, who would be teaching it. And this is Plato's first cut: the sophists claimed to teach what Athens' most distinguished statesmen could not pass on to their own sons. Plato's argument, as Guthrie reads it, is that this is not a coincidence or a failure of effort. It reveals something far more fundamental, and that is that virtue is not the kind of thing that can be transmitted from one person or another, regardless of who's doing the teaching. In other words, he argues that this cannot be taught. Here a sharp clarification is needed, because Plato is not simply on the other side of this argument from the Sophists. The Sophists claim to have the knowledge of virtue and how to teach it.

9:42 Socrates claimed they had neither. Socrates deployed a method, as we discussed earlier, known as the lynchus. And this is a process of systematic cross-examination. As Professor Weiss, a contemporary scholar of Plato, argues, this rigorous process of cross-examination does not deliver virtue; it delivers the recognition of ignorance. She says this in the best of senses. And that recognition, Professor Weiss contends, is itself a form of wisdom. Only those who understand the limits of what they know are capable of genuinely seeking what they do not. So this is a kind of humility about what we know and what we can know. Ignorance, therefore, is not the opposite of knowledge, but actually the doorway to it. So while the sophists were boosting their students' confidence, Socrates was engaged in a process designed to help his interlocutor recognize how little they actually knew.

10:45 As Professor Guthrie reads it, "The sophist's promise to teach virtue was not just overconfident; it was built on a foundation that just could not last." So what does Plato conclude from all of this? Well, not that virtue is impossible, but something actually far more unsettling. He concludes that what passes for virtue in public life actually is merely true opinion, and it's not knowledge. True opinion, as Socrates describes in the Meno, is a correct belief that a person holds without being able to explain why it is correct. So you have a belief, sometimes it's actually correct, but you have no idea why it exists.

11:29 It comes to us through instinct, upbringing, habit, or what Socrates calls pointedly, divine dispensation. So we may act rightly on the basis of it, but we can't teach it, can't defend it under questioning, and we can't pass it on to anybody reliably because we don't truly understand why it exists in the first place. So he's kind of describing here the idea of a belief that you hold, that you carry through, that you've acquired through habit, through social norms, and you've never really looked at why it exists or be able to justify it. But sometimes it turns out to be the quote unquote correct way of being. So, for example, he raises, a person could hold a strong opinion about the right road to take, but not knowing why it's the right road to take.

12:18 And they may arrive at this destination as somebody who does, who actually does know why. The difference is, if the road conditions change and someone asks that person their reasoning, if they don't have it, the person with knowledge will be the one who will be able to guide and navigate a new path. The person who is only existing on true opinion is lost. So this, as Professor Weiss carefully argues, is precisely the problem with what the sophists were producing. Their students could not give reasons for themselves. And true opinion, she argues, cannot be reliably passed on precisely because it carries no account of itself.

12:59 It just wanders. The sophists were not producing citizens capable of genuine moral reasoning. They were instead producing individuals who could perform virtue, or the look of virtue, until the moment Socrates asked them why. That is not civic virtue, according to Socrates. That is the appearance of virtue. So what Plato achieves in the Meno goes to the heart of the Sophist vision of civic progress. As both Guthrie and Professor George Klosko, a contemporary scholar of ancient political philosophy, argue, he dismantles the intellectual foundation on which that vision rested. The Sophists believed that citizens could become more just, capable, and virtuous through education. This is the cornerstone of their whole program.

13:48 That belief rested entirely on the claim that virtue was teachable. But Socrates' examination reveals something that undermines it at the root. Even Athens' most celebrated statesmen could neither account for the source of their virtue, so they had no idea where it came from, nor did they or could they pass it on to their sons. What arrived by instinct could not be systematically taught. As Professor Klasco reads it, the entire sophist vision of a citizenry gradually improving through education was built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what education can actually do. So at its core, it's a program that is based on a false premise. And once teachability falls that way, the entire vision falls with it.

14:39 So having examined Socrates' position that virtue cannot be taught in the Meno, Another question remains, which we alluded to up front. If virtue cannot be reliably transmitted from one person to the other, then what exactly are the sophists offering? And what they are offering is rhetoric, the ability to persuade. This is their central instrument, their critics claim. A genuine discipline, or is it a discipline at all? So this is where the dialogue of Gorgias begins. The Gorgias was written around the same time as the Meno, and this places it at the heart of Plato's sustained engagement with the Sophist program. As Professor Dodd frames it in his landmark commentary on the dialogue, the Gorgias opens as a direct test of whether rhetoric, the art of persuasion, actually qualifies as a genuine techne. Or a skill. The dialogue takes its name from Gorgias of Leontini, and he drew students from across Greece.

15:42 Socrates reads him as essentially an honorable person, master practitioner who simply never subjected his own craft to serious self-examination. When Socrates arrives, he begins to ask those questions, and the examination begins. So he exposes this, and it's referred to as the three tests. Of a genuine techne. Socrates, as Dodd reads it, applies 3 criteria to determine whether rhetoric qualifies at all as genuine techne. First, it must have a specific subject matter. So it must be about, for a skill, it must have something specific in mind.

16:22 Two, it must aim at the genuine good of its objects. So in other words, it must have a beneficial aim. And number 3, it must be able to give an account of itself. So its practitioner must know not just how it works, but why it works. Rhetoric, Socrates argues, in actuality, what the sophists were teaching, fails on all 3 counts. He argues it has no specific subject matter at all. It just produces this quote-unquote, skill about persuasion about any topic at all. Number 2, it doesn't aim at the genuine good of its audience. It aims to flatter them and to persuade them to one particular point or another. And number 3, it can't give an account of itself.

17:14 As Professor Kerford, and he's a leading scholar of the, the Sophist traditions, argues, political skill was held to be something acquired through practice and refinement. Not genuine knowledge of what is good. So Plato's argument in the Gorgias targets that entire tradition, not just Gorgias the person himself. What rhetoric actually is, Socrates argues, is closer to a knack than a craft. It's just a way, it's a habit of producing flattery without any understanding of what genuinely benefits the person being persuaded. And the person giving it doesn't really believe it, or we don't know. 'cause he doesn't understand why. Dodge translation captions this precisely: "It is an experience-based practice rather than an actual techne." So based on this discussion, the significance of this distinction is actually quite critical because the sophists claimed rhetoric was the instrument of paideia, the skill, as we mentioned before, the skill that would make citizens capable of a genuine civic virtue.

18:19 But conversely, Plato's argument is that you cannot build character if one has no understanding of what character even is. As Plato argues through Socrates, a knack for persuasion dressed up as moral education is not real paideia. You're not teaching people how to live well. And this, he claims, is the sophist program's major flaw. So in discussing the dialogue of Gorgias, Let's see how Plato uses the three interlocutors. And this is the most revealing aspect of the dialogue. Having established that rhetoric fails the test of a genuine techne, which we just went through the three-point plan, Plato structures the rest of the conversation around three successive exchanges, each one more candid than the last. Three figures: Gorgias, Polus, and probably the most controversial, Callicles. Each defend the use of rhetoric in attaining power and prestige. Together, as Professor Klosko reads it, they constitute Plato's portrait of what the sophist education program actually produces, not in theory, but how it operates in the real world. So Gorgias opens the dialogue claiming that rhetoric is the greatest of all skills, the one that gives its possessors ultimate power over others. Professor Dodds, however, reads him as essentially honorable and a man who has mastered his art but never seriously questioned what it was for.

19:47 The crack that Socrates begins to work on appears when he asks whether rhetoric can be used to produce injustice. So can you use this knack of persuasion to produce something that's unjust? Gorgias does not contest this. He just simply assumes his students already know what is good before they arrive. Students already have a preconceived conception of good. Plato's point, as Dodds reads it, is that this assumption is the flaw in Sophist thinking that runs through the entire edifice of their project. If rhetoric is neutral, it can serve either justice or injustice equally. So therefore, it is not paideia. It is not a method by which to teach people to live well. It can, in some cases, be used as a weapon. And Gorgias and the sophists have been handing it over to anyone willing to pay to learn how to use that weapon. In his next exchange with Polus, who was Gorgias' student, Polus drops the pretense completely that his teacher maintained. Whereas Gorgias spoke of rhetoric in terms of its benefit to the city, Polus sees rhetoric strictly as a tool for attaining power.

21:06 Justice, he positions as a constraint, and those who use it look at justice as a way of getting around it. Socrates' response, as Dodds notes, is the most paradoxical argument in the entire dialogue. So doing injustice, he proclaims, is actually worse than suffering it. And the tyrant, far from being the most enviable of men, is actually the most miserable. Well, this is very interesting, because now he's saying, okay, you could use this tool for injustice, and you will be the most miserable for it. So this directly inverts everything Polus values. The listener who has patterned the argument from the Meno will recognize the pattern.

21:48 Socrates is not offering a competing theory of power. He is dismantling the very framework in which Polus' entire worldview rests. And that worldview holds that power, reputation, and the ability to act without constraint are the highest goods a person can possess. And now we get to the most controversial figure of the three: Callicles. This is Socrates' final interlocutor, and his most formidable. As Professor Klasco reads it: He is its logical endpoint, a man fully formed by the program, successful on its own terms, and one who has drawn from it the most dangerous conclusion possible. And that conclusion is that natural superiority, it not only permits domination, but it actually demands it. So Callicles is, in other words, exactly what the sophist program produces.

22:45 At its fullest extension. So as Professor Dodd argues, this is a really important point to focus on here, because as Professor Dodd argues, Callicles' ambitions directly challenge Plato's most fundamental conviction, that the highest human good is the health and the order of the soul, and that justice is its expression. Callicles' worldview and his idea is that power and the satisfaction of the appetite replace justice as the highest good. So for Plato, that inversion is not merely wrong, it is a dangerous idea for a citizen of Athens to hold. Moreover, Callicles' vision is quite stark.

23:27 He argued that conventional morality in general is a fiction invented by the weak to restrain the strong. So under nature's law, he posited—the law of the jungle, some might say—the strong do not merely have the right to dominate, they have the obligation to do so. Justice, as Callicles sees it, is not a virtue; it is a constraint to be circumvented. Many modern scholars have found that Callicles' position highly significant beyond this dialogue itself. Professor Dodds observes that Gorgias is the most modern of Plato's dialogues because its central questions regard how to control the power of propaganda in a democracy and how to reestablish moral standards in a world whose traditional standards have completely disintegrated, and are also, he argues, the central problems of the 20th century.

24:27 This is what Dodds is arguing. To make this case, he actually enlists Nietzsche, who, as Dodds documents, came to see in the Sophists the forerunners of his own radical moral skepticism. And found in Callicles their most compelling spokesman. As Dodd argues, Nietzsche's most notorious ideas were inspired not by the Plato who speaks through Socrates and argues for justice, but by the voice Plato constructed to oppose himself, what Dodd called the anti-Plato in Plato, whose persona is in Callicles. Let me just pause on this point for one second. So what basically Nietzsche is saying is that the most powerful figure from this dialogue is not the figures that, in this case, Socrates uses to go against Callicles, but the exposure of Callicles himself.

25:18 Callicles emerges as the most dominant, and this, he saw, Professor Dodd saw, as a dangerous idea. Plato was not conflicted, he argues. He was strategic, giving the opposing position its most powerful expression precisely in order to dismantle it. But then Dodd goes on to say, "The strategy carried an unintended consequence. By articulating Callicles' position with such force and clarity," so in other words, Plato held up Callicles so strongly and created him as such a, let's say, an anti-villain, if I could take that liberty, that through this process, that Plato inadvertently ensured its own survival. He ensured the words of Callicles.

26:05 So the ideas— this is Dodds' argument— the ideas he set out to destroy were actually preserved in his own words. So in summation, Callicles for Plato represents the final destination of the sophist educational program. Not the most capable, virtuous citizen that the sophists promised, but its most extreme expression. And that expression was in Callicles. So what Plato achieves across These three conversations in the Gorgias, as both Dodds and Professor Klotzko read it, is a dismantling of the sophist theory of civic progress in the most dramatic form. Each interlocutor is more candid than the last, with Callicles being the most extreme.

26:52 And the gap between the sophist promise and the sophist product widens as the dialogue continues. Gorgias promised education. Polus revealed that ambition really was at the root. And then Callicles came in and confirmed that ambition unconstrained by justice is the program's natural destination. So while the sophists believed that rhetoric would make better citizens, Plato's argument in this dialogue staged across these three conversations is that it makes Callicles, and that this is not an accident. It is what the program was designed to produce. This is what Plato did, finally, to indict the entire sophist program. Well, today, across two dialogues and three interlocutors, Plato has done something precise and deliberate. In summation, in the Meno, He dismantled the Sophists' claim that virtue (aretē) can even be reliably taught by demonstrating that even Athens' most celebrated statesmen could neither account for the source of their own virtue, nor did they pass it on to their sons.

28:06 In The Gorgias, he dismantled the instrument that the Sophists relied upon to teach it by showing that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, fails every test of a genuine craft. It is not techne—that was the point of his argument—because it has no specific subject matter, its focus is on flattery over goodness, and it possesses no discernible justification for its own use other than persuasion. Both attacks exposed the same confusion at the heart of the sophist program: the belief that technical training in rhetoric could substitute for genuine moral formation. So this was Plato's main project, and what he tried to show was that techne, or the appearance of techne, could not replace paideia, the skills of living well. What Plato leaves open through his ideas has significant implications regarding the notion of human progress.

29:01 The question of what genuine civic education looks like and whether a pathway for moral development is possible at all still remains unanswered. Plato just took apart the entire Sophist model and showed that civic education could not be passed on from one to another, but yet he doesn't show us, well, then what is the pathway? That is the question in episode 8 that we will try to carry forward as we look at Aristotle and how he looked at this topic. Thanks for listening, and thanks for coming to Notions of Progress. We hope to see you soon, and thanks again for coming.

30:13 Mm-hmm.