Reading Plato's Gorgias

Oration vs Dialogue, round one.

Socrates is explaining one of his many counter-intuitive views, that the man who attempts to become a tyrant and is caught and punished, is less miserable than the man who succeeds. His conversation partner, Polus, riled up and arrogant, laughs at the apparent stupidity of the idea.

“Don’t you think you have been refuted already, Socrates” he says, “when you’re saying things no human being would maintain? Just ask any one of these people”. He gestures at their assembled friends, more his than Socrates’s. To his surprise the normally indulgent group merely smirk, and wait.

Socrates begins his response in mock humility. He tells a story… last year when his tribe was elected to the Athenian council, and he was randomly selected to lead the session, he was laughed at. He did not know how to call for a vote. Drawing on this legal/political metaphor, he says: “For I do know how to produce one witness to whatever I’m saying, and that’s the man I’m having a discussion with. The majority I disregard”. He repudiates the need to convince public opinion. He’ll get at the group through one man. Polus.

There are echoes of his speech from minutes before, when he dismissed Polus’s long opening gambit with:

“My wonderful man, you’re trying to refute me in oratorical style, the way people in law courts do when they think they’re refuting some claim. There, too, one side thinks it’s refuting the other when it produces many reputable witnesses on behalf of the arguments it presents, while the person who asserts the opposite produces only one witness, or none at all. This “refutation” is worthless, as far as truth is concerned, for it might happen sometimes that an individual is brought down by the false testimony of many reputable people”

In other words — being able to bring forward a reputable witness is not essentially linked to the truth of your claim. Neither is, as Polus does, bringing forth a reputable opinion. Socrates does not care if your opinion is popular, he wants knowledge, not belief. He wants to think through, step by step, until he is sure something is true.

Oration vs Dialogue

One way to draw the line between Polus and Socrates is to call their favoured modes different names — Oration versus Dialogue. Another is to describe what they are.

One such description: Polus favours a high-trust investigation, where the opinion of the group is admissible as testimony. Polus is, in this way, a democrat (though, Socrates implies, an elitist one). Socrates, by contrast, is always engaged in a radically low-trust investigation. He will not take your word, or the word of an authority, for anything. He will only accept, or ask you to accept, what you can analyse and think through together.

Put this way, perhaps Socrates’ approach seems like the obviously correct one, at least insofar as you are aiming at truth. However it’s probably worth noting that it doesn’t work. Plato, in all of his socratic dialogues, succeeds in interesting the reader, introducing distinctions that will become canonical in philosophy, sketching simple or strange arguments… he never succeeds in establishing a conclusion in a way that is genuinely transparent and evident. You can always introduce more distinctions, find a logical flaw, fiddle with a definition, and unwind the entire thing. This, as we have seen since Plato, is true of all philosophy.

… Okay that was a bit abrupt. Before I move on I want to show that that isn’t a throw away line. If Socrates’ method was promising, then I’d argue we should be able to produce some argument from philosophy, even a very complex one, which is compelling to all who understand it. Not just a premise, or a step in an argument, but a conclusion. And yet this is not the case¹. Even an argument that is explicitly intended to play this role — Descartes’ cogito — is hopeless².

This doesn’t mean that Socrates’ project is pointless. I personally find it intrinsically valuable to engage in the kind of hard analytical thinking and mutual understanding that a truly philosophic dialogue demands. But it isn’t how we can establish knowledge, or phrased less platonically, the conclusions we can build our decisions on.

And yet we must act, and we want to act based on true beliefs. If we can’t rely on establishing un-impeachable conclusions, what then can we do?

When I was a teenager I used to go on long walks on the moor with my scout troop. One year, I was put into a group with some very impatient people. Rather than mapping out a route to avoid the bogs, they preferred to straight-line their way to most destinations. Bogs on Dartmoor are often covered in clumps of elephant grass. You can stand on these and propel yourself forward, even as they sink into the mud and water. If you’re good, you can cross areas marked as rivers on the map without getting your feet wet. But if you’re indecisive, if you stop to think, you’ll sink.

Perhaps we can build off of beliefs which are as correct as the elephant grass is solid — i.e. correct enough, for a bit, and not to be paused on and examined more closely. We probably all do this. It’s extremely rare that we even agree on the definitions of the words we use to debate with each other, or explore the precise meaning of our own beliefs. And if we don’t even do that, how can we be sure we are saying anything we’d agree with on reflection?

As you may have seen — there is a major problem here. If we can’t trust the individual beliefs we express, how do we know that the act of discussing them will lead us towards truth? They may just lead us further into the bog, where we can run around in circles forever.

Systems

One solution is to trust in the truth-selecting power of systems.

Socrates claims that he is speaking only to Polus “For I do know how to produce one witness to whatever I’m saying, and that’s the man I’m having a discussion with. The majority I disregard”, but he and we know that he is also speaking before a group. Plato, who to some degree speaks through Socrates, chose to write these dialogues for an audience. There is an audience, and some kind of system outside of just the dyad of questioner-answerer, refuter-refuted.

The result is not unlike the system we rely on in criminal courts. Two people, the prosecutor and the defendant, represent the best arguments they can think of on their side. There is cross-examination, disagreement³, and all the while, the Jury is watching. This Jury then decides, with the guidance of the Judge, which argument wins out.

In both systems, we are relying on the idea that there is some black-box system in the audience/readers/jury, which lets us discern the true from the false. Is there? Or are we, like Polus, merely comparing statements we hear with our imagined amalgamation of the group’s opinion?

More on this in a future post.

I’m posting this because a) I’m reading the Gorgias for a reading group I’m running with a friend for the Catherine Project and b) I’m trying to lower my publishing bar by posting weekly. Apologies for the abrupt ending, but if you wanted more, please comment. I’ll do my best to reply and continue the dialogue.

1. Comment with your examples if you disagree. I.e. an argument that is so watertight that when people disagree with it, you think they must not understand.

2. Specifically it is either trivial (If A is Xing, then there must be at least one A), or false — to think does not entail a ‘thick’ concept of being.

3. Okay I don’t know precisely how this works.