GorgiasPlato
About Gorgias
The is Plato's fiercest dialogue on the relation between rhetoric, power, and justice. Socrates confronts three interlocutors in sequence, each more aggressive than the last. Gorgias, the famous orator, claims rhetoric is the greatest of arts because it gives power over others. Polus, his student, argues that the rhetorician who can do whatever he wants in the city is enviable. Callicles, the most formidable opponent, abandons conventional morality altogether: nature, he insists, rewards the strong, and justice is merely the convention by which the weak restrain those who are superior to them.
Socrates answers each in turn. Against Gorgias, he argues that rhetoric without knowledge of justice is not a genuine art but a knack for flattery. Against Polus, he advances the claim that it is worse to commit injustice than to suffer it, and worse still to commit it unpunished, because punishment is the medicine of the soul. Against Callicles, he argues that the life of unbounded desire is like a leaky jar, never filled, and that true power belongs to the person who governs himself by reason.
The dialogue ends with a myth of judgment after death, in which souls are stripped of their bodies and judged naked. Socrates is prepared to face that judgment. The stakes of the are absolute: the question is not whether rhetoric is useful but whether the examined life, the life of philosophy, is worth living at all.