Gorgias
to Rhadamanthus the souls are only known as good or bad; they are
stripped of their dignities and preferments; he despatches the bad to
Tartarus, labelled either as curable or incurable, and looks with love
and admiration on the soul of some just one, whom he sends to the
islands of the blest. Similar is the practice of Aeacus; and Minos
overlooks them, holding a golden sceptre, as Odysseus in Homer saw him
“Wielding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead.”
My wish for myself and my fellow-men is, that we may present our souls
undefiled to the judge in that day; my desire in life is to be able to
meet death. And I exhort you, and retort upon you the reproach which
you cast upon me,—that you will stand before the judge, gaping, and
with dizzy brain, and any one may box you on the ear, and do you all
manner of evil.
Perhaps you think that this is an old wives’ fable. But you, who are
the three wisest men in Hellas, have nothing better to say, and no one
will ever show that to do is better than to suffer evil. A man should
study to be, and not merely to seem. If he is bad, he should become
good, and avoid all flattery, whether of the many or of the few.
Follow me, then; and if you are looked down upon, that will do you no
harm. And when we have practised virtue, we will betake ourselves to
politics, but not until we are delivered from the shameful state of
ignorance and uncertainty in which we are at present. Let us follow in
the way of virtue and justice, and not in the way to which you,
Callicles, invite us; for that way is nothing worth.
We will now consider in order some of the principal points of the
dialogue. Having regard (1) to the age of Plato and the ironical
character of his writings, we may compare him with himself, and with
other great teachers, and we may note in passing the objections of his
critics. And then (2) casting one eye upon him, we may cast another
upon ourselves, and endeavour to draw out the great lessons which he
teaches for all time, stripped of the accidental form in which they are
enveloped.
(1) In the Gorgias, as in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, we
are made aware that formal logic has as yet no existence. The old
difficulty of framing a definition recurs. The illusive analogy of the
arts and the virtues also continues. The ambiguity of several words,
such as nature, custom, the honourable, the good, is not cleared up.
The Sophists are still floundering about the distinction of the real
and seeming. Figures of speech are made the basis of arguments. The
possibility of conceiving a universal art or science, which admits of
application to a particular subject-matter, is a difficulty which
remains unsolved, and has not altogether ceased to haunt the world at
the present day (compare Charmides). The defect of clearness is also
apparent in Socrates himself, unless we suppose him to be practising on
the simplicity of his opponent, or rather perhaps trying an experiment
in dialectics. Nothing can be more fallacious than the contradiction
which he pretends to have discovered in the answers of Gorgias (see
above). The advantages which he gains over Polus are also due to a
false antithesis of pleasure and good, and to an erroneous assertion
that an agent and a patient may be described by similar predicates;—a
mistake which Aristotle partly shares and partly corrects in the
Nicomachean Ethics. Traces of a “robust sophistry” are likewise
discernible in his argument with Callicles.
(2) Although Socrates professes to be convinced by reason only, yet the
argument is often a sort of dialectical fiction, by which he conducts
himself and others to his own ideal of life and action. And we may
sometimes wish that we could have suggested answers to his antagonists,
or pointed out to them the rocks which lay concealed under the
ambiguous terms good, pleasure, and the like. But it would be as
useless to examine his arguments by the requirements of modern logic,
as to criticise this ideal from a merely utilitarian point of view. If
we say that the ideal is generally regarded as unattainable, and that
mankind will by no means agree in thinking that the criminal is happier
when punished than when unpunished, any more than they would agree to
the stoical paradox that a man may be happy on the rack, Plato has
already admitted that the world is against him. Neither does he mean to
say that Archelaus is tormented by the stings of conscience; or that
the sensations of the impaled criminal are more agreeable than those of
the tyrant drowned in luxurious enjoyment. Neither is he speaking, as
in the Protagoras, of virtue as a calculation of pleasure, an opinion
which he afterwards repudiates in the Phaedo. What then is his meaning?
His meaning we shall be able to illustrate best by parallel notions,
which, whether justifiable by logic or not, have always existed among
mankind. We must remind the reader that Socrates himself implies that
he will be understood or appreciated by very few.
He is speaking not of the consciousness of happiness, but of the idea
of happiness. When a martyr dies in a good cause, when a soldier falls
in battle, we do not suppose that death or wounds are without pain, or
that their physical suffering is always compensated by a mental
satisfaction. Still we regard them as happy, and we would a thousand
times rather have their death than a shameful life. Nor is this only
because we believe that they will obtain an immortality of fame, or
that they will have crowns of glory in another world, when their
enemies and persecutors will be proportionably tormented. Men are found
in a few instances to do what is right, without reference to public
opinion or to consequences. And we regard them as happy on this ground
only, much as Socrates’ friends in the opening of the Phaedo are
described as regarding him; or as was said of another, “they looked
upon his face as upon the face of an angel.” We are not concerned to
justify this idealism by the standard of utility or public opinion, but
merely to point out the existence of such a sentiment in the better
part of human nature.
The idealism of Plato is founded upon this sentiment. He would maintain
that in some sense or other truth and right are alone to be sought, and
that all other goods are only desirable as means towards these. He is
thought to have erred in “considering the agent only, and making no
reference to the happiness of others, as affected by him.” But the
happiness of others or of mankind, if regarded as an end, is really
quite as ideal and almost as paradoxical to the common understanding as
Plato’s conception of happiness. For the greatest happiness of the
greatest number may mean also the greatest pain of the individual which
will procure the greatest pleasure of the greatest number. Ideas of
utility, like those of duty and right, may be pushed to unpleasant
consequences. Nor can Plato in the Gorgias be deemed purely
self-regarding, considering that Socrates expressly mentions the duty
of imparting the truth when discovered to others. Nor must we forget
that the side of ethics which regards others is by the ancients merged
in politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well as in the Stoics, the
social principle, though taking another form, is really far more
prominent than in most modern treatises on ethics.
The idealizing of suffering is one of the conceptions which have
exercised the greatest influence on mankind. Into the theological
import of this, or into the consideration of the errors to which the
idea may have given rise, we need not now enter. All will agree that
the ideal of the Divine Sufferer, whose words the world would not
receive, the man of sorrows of whom the Hebrew prophets spoke, has sunk
deep into the heart of the human race. It is a similar picture of
suffering goodness which Plato desires to pourtray, not without an
allusion to the fate of his master Socrates. He is convinced that,
somehow or other, such an one must be happy in life or after death. In
the Republic, he endeavours to show that his happiness would be assured
here in a well-ordered state. But in the actual condition of human
things the wise and good are weak and miserable; such an one is like a
man fallen among wild beasts, exposed to every sort of wrong and
obloquy.
Plato, like other philosophers, is thus led on to the conclusion, that
if “the ways of God” to man are to be “justified,” the hopes of another
life must be included. If the question could have been put to him,
whether a man dying in torments was happy still, even if, as he
suggests in the Apology, “death be only a long sleep,” we can hardly
tell what would have been his answer. There have been a few, who, quite
independently of rewards and punishments or of posthumous reputation,
or any other influence of public opinion, have been willing to
sacrifice their lives for the good of others. It is difficult to say
how far in such cases an unconscious hope of a future life, or a
general faith in the victory of good in the world, may have supported
the sufferers. But this extreme idealism is not in accordance with the
spirit of Plato. He supposes a day of retribution, in which the good
are to be rewarded and the wicked punished. Though, as he says in the
Phaedo, no man of sense will maintain that the details of the stories
about another world are true, he will insist that something of the kind
is true, and will frame his life with a view to this unknown future.
Even in the Republic he introduces a future life as an afterthought,
when the superior happiness of the just has been established on what is
thought to be an immutable foundation. At the same time he makes a
point of determining his main thesis independently of remoter
consequences.
(3) Plato’s theory of punishment is partly vindictive, partly
corrective. In the Gorgias, as well as in the Phaedo and Republic, a
few great criminals, chiefly tyrants, are reserved as examples. But
most men have never had the opportunity of attaining this pre-eminence
of evil. They are not incurable, and their punishment is intended for
their improvement. They are to suffer because they have sinned; like
sick men, they must go to the physician and be healed. On this
representation of Plato’s the criticism has been made, that the analogy
of disease and injustice is partial only, and that suffering, instead
of improving men, may have just the opposite effect.
Like the general analogy of the arts and the virtues, the analogy of
disease and injustice, or of medicine and justice, is certainly
imperfect. But ideas must be given through something; the nature of the
mind which is unseen can only be represented under figures derived from
visible objects. If these figures are suggestive of some new aspect
under which the mind may be considered, we cannot find fault with them
for not exactly coinciding with the ideas represented. They partake of
the imperfect nature of language, and must not be construed in too
strict a manner. That Plato sometimes reasons from them as if they were
not figures but realities, is due to the defective logical analysis of
his age.
Nor does he distinguish between the suffering which improves and the
suffering which only punishes and deters. He applies to the sphere of
ethics a conception of punishment which is really derived from criminal
law. He does not see that such punishment is only negative, and
supplies no principle of moral growth or development. He is not far off
the higher notion of an education of man to be begun in this world, and
to be continued in other stages of existence, which is further
developed in the Republic. And Christian thinkers, who have ventured
out of the beaten track in their meditations on the “last things,” have