Summary
Socrates and Chaerephon arrive after Gorgias’ display at the house of Callicles. Socrates does not ask for another performance; he wants to question Gorgias about what his art is and what it produces.
Chaerephon begins, but Polus responds with praise instead of definition. Socrates takes over. Gorgias identifies himself as a rhetorician who can make others rhetoricians and agrees to use brief answers.
Because many arts employ speech, rhetoric must be distinguished by its subject and end. Gorgias says it concerns the greatest human good: persuasive power in courts, councils and assemblies, giving freedom to the speaker and rule over others.
Socrates distinguishes persuasion that creates knowledge from persuasion that creates belief. Rhetoric produces conviction before crowds about justice and injustice without necessarily teaching them.
Gorgias boasts that rhetoricians can defeat experts before non-expert audiences. He compares misuse of rhetoric with misuse of boxing: the teacher should not be blamed for an unjust pupil. Yet he also says he teaches justice when pupils lack it.
Socrates draws a contradiction. If a person who knows justice is just and acts justly, a properly trained rhetorician should not misuse the art. Polus accuses Socrates of exploiting Gorgias’ shame and takes up the argument.
Asked to define rhetoric, Socrates calls it an experience or routine rather than an art. It is a species of flattery aimed at gratification. Cookery imitates medicine, cosmetics imitates physical training, sophistry imitates legislation and rhetoric imitates justice.
A genuine art understands the nature and good of its object. Flattery guesses at pleasure without knowledge. Polus protests that rhetoricians are powerful like tyrants because they can kill, exile and confiscate.
Socrates distinguishes doing what seems best from doing what one wills. People perform actions for the sake of a good they seek. If killing or exile actually harms the agent, doing it does not achieve the good ultimately willed.
They agree that doing injustice is more shameful than suffering it. Socrates argues that the more shameful is worse because it exceeds in pain or badness. Since doing injustice is not more painful to the perpetrator, it must be worse in itself.
Polus cites Archelaus, who obtained Macedonian power through grave wrongdoing. Socrates refuses to call him happy without knowing whether he is just. Wealth and kingship cannot establish well-being.
Socrates argues that punishment resembles medical treatment. The person punished justly is released from moral evil, whereas the unpunished wrongdoer retains a diseased soul. The worst condition is therefore to commit injustice and escape correction.
This reverses rhetoric’s apparent use. If a friend has done wrong, rhetoric should help expose the wrong so that correction occurs. If one wished to harm an enemy, preventing that person’s punishment would leave the enemy corrupted.
Callicles asks whether Socrates is serious. He claims Socrates shifts between convention and nature. The many make laws to restrain stronger people, but natural justice permits the superior to rule and possess more.
He criticises lifelong philosophy as childish. An adult philosopher lacks practical knowledge, cannot speak effectively in court and may be punished by inferior people without being able to defend himself.
Under questioning, Callicles defines superior people as intelligent and courageous political rulers. He denies that they should restrain themselves: great desires, boldly satisfied, constitute natural virtue and happiness.
Socrates compares uncontrolled desire to leaky vessels that require endless refilling. Callicles prefers continuous pleasure to a completed condition with no further need.
Socrates then tests the identity of pleasure and good. A person may feel pleasure and pain simultaneously, as when drinking while thirsty, but cannot be in good and bad condition in the same respect at once. Cowards may also feel more pleasure at an enemy’s retreat than courageous people.
Callicles concedes that pleasures differ in value. Good pleasures benefit and bad pleasures harm. Pleasure must therefore be selected for the sake of goodness, requiring knowledge rather than appetite alone.
Socrates returns to rhetoric. Music, poetry and public speaking can seek audience pleasure without improvement. A genuine speaker should order citizens’ souls, encouraging justice and temperance even when the message is unwelcome.
When Callicles withdraws from active exchange, Socrates completes parts of the argument himself. Every good thing has an order appropriate to it. Order in the soul is temperance, which supports justice, courage and right relationship with gods and people.
The intemperate person cannot sustain friendship or community because unlimited appetite resists equality and order. The good life therefore requires self-government rather than constant expansion of desire.
Socrates examines admired Athenian leaders. If they were genuine statesmen, they should have made citizens better. Yet the people later turned against them, suggesting that they gratified and enlarged public appetite without cultivating justice.
He distinguishes servants who supply ships, walls and revenues from practitioners of the political art. Material achievement alone does not show that citizens’ characters improved.
Socrates claims to practise true politics because he speaks for what is best rather than what pleases. This may leave him defenceless in court, like a physician accused by a cook before children.
He accepts the risk of suffering injustice but fears committing it. The best defence is a soul free from wrongdoing, not a speech capable of escaping every penalty.
Socrates closes with a story of judgement after death. Zeus orders that souls be judged naked, after separation from bodies, so wealth, status, beauty and witnesses cannot deceive the judges.
Rhadamanthus and Aeacus judge souls travelling towards punishment or the Isles of the Blessed, while Minos has final authority. Punishment either corrects curable wrongdoing or provides examples through incurable offenders.
Socrates urges Callicles to pursue truth and justice rather than the life of flattery. Appearing foolish before the many is less shameful than reaching judgement with a soul marked by injustice.