Plato presents Socrates arriving at the end of a display Gorgias has just given to great acclaim. Socrates’ faithful sidekick Chaerephon (whom we shall meet again) offers to arrange a special audience for Socrates to hear his friend Gorgias. But Socrates wants to ask questions of Gorgias one-on-one. Meeting Gorgias, Socrates says, “Now then, tell us what your art is, and what we should call Gorgias.” Gorgias answers that his art is oratory, and he is an orator. “So we may assume that you are able to make other people orators as well?” asks Socrates, to which Gorgias assents.[11]
“What things is oratory a knowledge of?” asks Socrates. “Of speeches,” replies Gorgias. But one can give speeches about almost anything, for instance the doctor about medicine. Yet a doctor is not an orator. Almost any art or science uses speech to communicate its ideas. What specifically does the orator concern himself with in speeches? With a little help from Socrates, Gorgias explains that the orator is concerned with persuading people of his views. So what kind of persuasion are we talking about? Gorgias answers, “I mean the kind of persuasion that is attempted in courts of law and other public gatherings, as I just said, concerning issues of justice and injustice.”[12]
Socrates goes on to distinguish between a state of belief unconnected with knowledge and a state of knowledge. Only the art or science of a given subject could teach the latter, while oratory could provide the former. “So oratory, it turns out, creates not reliable instruction but belief concerning justice and injustice.” Gorgias agrees.[13] Socrates challenges Gorgias to explain the advantages of such an art, as the sophist might wish to do to win prospective students. Gorgias points out that his brother is a doctor, a practitioner of the art of healing people. But often when his brother has been unable to persuade his patients to undergo treatments, he has called on Gorgias to convince them with his oratory. But, Gorgias warns, students should be careful not to use their oratorical skills to bad ends. This would be a misuse of them, which should be blamed on the irresponsible student rather than the teacher. “One should use oratory justly, just like any competitive skill.”[14]
This last point bothers Socrates. Is oratory ethically neutral, so that it seeks to argue pro and con about justice and injustice without committing itself to the truth of such things? If oratory is persuasion about what is just and unjust, right and wrong, “Mustn’t the student know these things, and already understand them before he comes to you to study oratory?” asks Socrates. “Otherwise, you, the teacher of oratory, can teach the prospective student nothing?” To which Gorgias replies, “Well, Socrates, I suppose if he happens not to know this, I could teach him that too.”[15] Elsewhere, Plato points out that Gorgias did not even claim to teach virtue. He has Gorgias’ student Meno say, “What I especially admire about Gorgias, Socrates, is that you will never hear him promising this [to teach virtue], but he makes fun of the other sophists, when he hears them making such promises.”[16]
Here we glimpse the great divide between Gorgias and Socrates. Whereas the sophist thinks of an understanding of justice and injustice, good and evil, as a kind of afterthought—or, according to Meno, an irrelevancy—the philosopher sees it as the essence of everything important. Gorgias and other sophists see themselves as offering a technē, an art or craft, of persuasion or argumentation, as a path to getting what you want. In one sense Socrates finds the idea of such a craft extremely attractive. A craft is a kind of applied science that can be put to use to make the world a better place. Look at medicine, architecture, shipbuilding, even the humbler trades such as weaving and shoemaking. All of them provide valuable products or services to the community. All of them make the world a better place. But each of them starts with a clear objective, which is some good for the community. The architect aims at producing a house, the doctor at restoring health. Without a clear conception of the good as the aim to be achieved, there can be no true craft.
The fact that Gorgias could say that the skill of persuasion could be misused suggests that he does not conceive of it as a craft at all. If a doctor should set out not to heal but to harm a patient, then he would not be practicing medicine, period. He would cease to be a doctor and become something else. Gorgias seems to have in mind as the objective of oratory not truth but winning arguments. But to win an argument by swaying ignorant people to believe a false conclusion would be a travesty, not an accomplishment.
Yet Gorgias could reply (though he does not to Socrates) that he had indeed raised the study of persuasion to new heights. The early poet Hesiod spoke of eloquence, whether of the poet or the public speaker, as a gift from the gods. He describes his own epiphany:
These Muses once taught Hesiod beautiful song,
when he was tending sheep under holy Helicon.
Him first the goddesses addressed,
the Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus:
“Rude shepherds, disgraceful creatures, mere bellies:
we know how to speak falsehoods that sound like truths,
and we know how, when we will, to utter truths.”
Thus spoke the articulate daughters of great Zeus,
and they plucked and gave me for a scepter a branch of flourishing laurel,
a marvel, and they breathed into me divine voice,
that I might proclaim things that will be and were;
and they bid me hymn the race of blessed beings that always are,
and ever to sing about the Muses first and last.[17]
The Muses breathed into Hesiod divine voice and gave him a scepter of laurel that he carried with him when he recited his verse. These same goddesses pour sweet dew on the tongues of god-nourished kings so that gracious words flow through their mouths. The kings render just judgment and they stand out like gods among men.[18] In archaic Greece eloquence was a divine gift, not an art or craft. It came by the will of the gods to whomever they wished to bless, whether shepherds or kings.
[11].Plato Gorgias 449a-b.
[12].Plato Gorgias 449d-454b
[13].Plato Gorgias 454b-455a.
[14].Plato Gorgias 457b after Zeyl.
[15].Plato Gorgias 459e, 460a.
[16].Plato Meno 95c.
[17].Hesiod Theogony 22-34.
[18].Hesiod Theogony 80-93.