Gorgias
found a ray of light in his writings. But he has not explained how or
in what way punishment is to contribute to the improvement of mankind.
He has not followed out the principle which he affirms in the Republic,
that “God is the author of evil only with a view to good,” and that
“they were the better for being punished.” Still his doctrine of a
future state of rewards and punishments may be compared favourably with
that perversion of Christian doctrine which makes the everlasting
punishment of human beings depend on a brief moment of time, or even on
the accident of an accident. And he has escaped the difficulty which
has often beset divines, respecting the future destiny of the meaner
sort of men (Thersites and the like), who are neither very good nor
very bad, by not counting them worthy of eternal damnation.
We do Plato violence in pressing his figures of speech or chains of
argument; and not less so in asking questions which were beyond the
horizon of his vision, or did not come within the scope of his design.
The main purpose of the Gorgias is not to answer questions about a
future world, but to place in antagonism the true and false life, and
to contrast the judgments and opinions of men with judgment according
to the truth. Plato may be accused of representing a superhuman or
transcendental virtue in the description of the just man in the
Gorgias, or in the companion portrait of the philosopher in the
Theaetetus; and at the same time may be thought to be condemning a
state of the world which always has existed and always will exist among
men. But such ideals act powerfully on the imagination of mankind. And
such condemnations are not mere paradoxes of philosophers, but the
natural rebellion of the higher sense of right in man against the
ordinary conditions of human life. The greatest statesmen have fallen
very far short of the political ideal, and are therefore justly
involved in the general condemnation.
Subordinate to the main purpose of the dialogue are some other
questions, which may be briefly considered:—
a. The antithesis of good and pleasure, which as in other dialogues is
supposed to consist in the permanent nature of the one compared with
the transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure,
knowledge and sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue
and pleasure, the real and the apparent, the infinite and finite,
harmony or beauty and discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry, are so
many pairs of opposites, which in Plato easily pass into one another,
and are seldom kept perfectly distinct. And we must not forget that
Plato’s conception of pleasure is the Heracleitean flux transferred to
the sphere of human conduct. There is some degree of unfairness in
opposing the principle of good, which is objective, to the principle of
pleasure, which is subjective. For the assertion of the permanence of
good is only based on the assumption of its objective character. Had
Plato fixed his mind, not on the ideal nature of good, but on the
subjective consciousness of happiness, that would have been found to be
as transient and precarious as pleasure.
b. The arts or sciences, when pursued without any view to truth, or the
improvement of human life, are called flatteries. They are all alike
dependent upon the opinion of mankind, from which they are derived. To
Plato the whole world appears to be sunk in error, based on
self-interest. To this is opposed the one wise man hardly professing to
have found truth, yet strong in the conviction that a virtuous life is
the only good, whether regarded with reference to this world or to
another. Statesmen, Sophists, rhetoricians, poets, are alike brought up
for judgment. They are the parodies of wise men, and their arts are the
parodies of true arts and sciences. All that they call science is
merely the result of that study of the tempers of the Great Beast,
which he describes in the Republic.
c. Various other points of contact naturally suggest themselves between
the Gorgias and other dialogues, especially the Republic, the Philebus,
and the Protagoras. There are closer resemblances both of spirit and
language in the Republic than in any other dialogue, the verbal
similarity tending to show that they were written at the same period of
Plato’s life. For the Republic supplies that education and training of
which the Gorgias suggests the necessity. The theory of the many weak
combining against the few strong in the formation of society (which is
indeed a partial truth), is similar in both of them, and is expressed
in nearly the same language. The sufferings and fate of the just man,
the powerlessness of evil, and the reversal of the situation in another
life, are also points of similarity. The poets, like the rhetoricians,
are condemned because they aim at pleasure only, as in the Republic
they are expelled by the State, because they are imitators, and
minister to the weaker side of human nature. That poetry is akin to
rhetoric may be compared with the analogous notion, which occurs in the
Protagoras, that the ancient poets were the Sophists of their day. In
some other respects the Protagoras rather offers a contrast than a
parallel. The character of Protagoras may be compared with that of
Gorgias, but the conception of happiness is different in the two
dialogues; being described in the former, according to the old Socratic
notion, as deferred or accumulated pleasure, while in the Gorgias, and
in the Phaedo, pleasure and good are distinctly opposed.
This opposition is carried out from a speculative point of view in the
Philebus. There neither pleasure nor wisdom are allowed to be the chief
good, but pleasure and good are not so completely opposed as in the
Gorgias. For innocent pleasures, and such as have no antecedent pains,
are allowed to rank in the class of goods. The allusion to Gorgias’
definition of rhetoric (Philebus; compare Gorg.), as the art of
persuasion, of all arts the best, for to it all things submit, not by
compulsion, but of their own free will—marks a close and perhaps
designed connection between the two dialogues. In both the ideas of
measure, order, harmony, are the connecting links between the beautiful
and the good.
In general spirit and character, that is, in irony and antagonism to
public opinion, the Gorgias most nearly resembles the Apology, Crito,
and portions of the Republic, and like the Philebus, though from
another point of view, may be thought to stand in the same relation to
Plato’s theory of morals which the Theaetetus bears to his theory of
knowledge.
d. A few minor points still remain to be summed up: (1) The extravagant
irony in the reason which is assigned for the pilot’s modest charge;
and in the proposed use of rhetoric as an instrument of
self-condemnation; and in the mighty power of geometrical equality in
both worlds. (2) The reference of the mythus to the previous discussion
should not be overlooked: the fate reserved for incurable criminals
such as Archelaus; the retaliation of the box on the ears; the
nakedness of the souls and of the judges who are stript of the clothes
or disguises which rhetoric and public opinion have hitherto provided
for them (compare Swift’s notion that the universe is a suit of
clothes, Tale of a Tub). The fiction seems to have involved Plato in
the necessity of supposing that the soul retained a sort of corporeal
likeness after death. (3) The appeal of the authority of Homer, who
says that Odysseus saw Minos in his court “holding a golden sceptre,”
which gives verisimilitude to the tale.
It is scarcely necessary to repeat that Plato is playing “both sides of
the game,” and that in criticising the characters of Gorgias and Polus,
we are not passing any judgment on historical individuals, but only
attempting to analyze the “dramatis personae’ as they were conceived by
him. Neither is it necessary to enlarge upon the obvious fact that
Plato is a dramatic writer, whose real opinions cannot always be
assumed to be those which he puts into the mouth of Socrates, or any
other speaker who appears to have the best of the argument; or to
repeat the observation that he is a poet as well as a philosopher; or
to remark that he is not to be tried by a modern standard, but
interpreted with reference to his place in the history of thought and
the opinion of his time.
It has been said that the most characteristic feature of the Gorgias is
the assertion of the right of dissent, or private judgment. But this
mode of stating the question is really opposed both to the spirit of
Plato and of ancient philosophy generally. For Plato is not asserting
any abstract right or duty of toleration, or advantage to be derived
from freedom of thought; indeed, in some other parts of his writings
(e.g. Laws), he has fairly laid himself open to the charge of
intolerance. No speculations had as yet arisen respecting the “liberty
of prophesying;’ and Plato is not affirming any abstract right of this
nature: but he is asserting the duty and right of the one wise and true
man to dissent from the folly and falsehood of the many. At the same
time he acknowledges the natural result, which he hardly seeks to
avert, that he who speaks the truth to a multitude, regardless of
consequences, will probably share the fate of Socrates.
The irony of Plato sometimes veils from us the height of idealism to
which he soars. When declaring truths which the many will not receive,
he puts on an armour which cannot be pierced by them. The weapons of
ridicule are taken out of their hands and the laugh is turned against
themselves. The disguises which Socrates assumes are like the parables
of the New Testament, or the oracles of the Delphian God; they half
conceal, half reveal, his meaning. The more he is in earnest, the more
ironical he becomes; and he is never more in earnest or more ironical
than in the Gorgias. He hardly troubles himself to answer seriously the
objections of Gorgias and Polus, and therefore he sometimes appears to
be careless of the ordinary requirements of logic. Yet in the highest
sense he is always logical and consistent with himself. The form of the
argument may be paradoxical; the substance is an appeal to the higher
reason. He is uttering truths before they can be understood, as in all
ages the words of philosophers, when they are first uttered, have found
the world unprepared for them. A further misunderstanding arises out of
the wildness of his humour; he is supposed not only by Callicles, but
by the rest of mankind, to be jesting when he is profoundly serious. At
length he makes even Polus in earnest. Finally, he drops the argument,
and heedless any longer of the forms of dialectic, he loses himself in
a sort of triumph, while at the same time he retaliates upon his
adversaries. From this confusion of jest and earnest, we may now return
to the ideal truth, and draw out in a simple form the main theses of
the dialogue.
First Thesis:—
It is a greater evil to do than to suffer injustice.
Compare the New Testament—
“It is better to suffer for well doing than for evil doing.”—1 Pet.
And the Sermon on the Mount—
“Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”—Matt.
The words of Socrates are more abstract than the words of Christ, but
they equally imply that the only real evil is moral evil. The righteous
may suffer or die, but they have their reward; and even if they had no
reward, would be happier than the wicked. The world, represented by
Polus, is ready, when they are asked, to acknowledge that injustice is
dishonourable, and for their own sakes men are willing to punish the
offender (compare Republic). But they are not equally willing to
acknowledge that injustice, even if successful, is essentially evil,