Jowett: rhetoricians

Rhetoric

There is another thing : — young men of the richer   classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord ; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and examine others themselves ; there are plenty of persons, as they soon enough discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing : and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me : This confounded Socrates  , they say ; this villainous misleader of youth ! — and then if somebody asks them, Why, what evil does he practise or teach ? they do not know, and cannot tell ; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause ; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected — which is the truth : and as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are all in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate calumnies. And this is the reason why my three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me ; Meletus, who has a quarrel with me on behalf of the poets ; Anytus, on behalf of the craftsmen ; Lycon, on behalf of the rhetoricians : and as I said at the beginning, I cannot expect to get rid of this mass of calumny all in a moment. And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and the whole truth ; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing. And yet I know that this plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth ? — this is the occasion and reason of their slander of me, as you will find out either in this or in any future inquiry. APOLOGY

Soc. And are we to say that you are able to make other men rhetoricians ? GORGIAS

Soc. Very good then ; as you profess to be a rhetorician, and a maker of rhetoricians, let me ask you, with what is rhetoric concerned : I might ask with what is weaving concerned, and you would reply (would you not ?), with the making of garments ? GORGIAS

Soc. Come, then, and let us see what we really mean about rhetoric ; for I do not know what my own meaning is as yet. When the assembly meets to elect a physician or a shipwright or any other craftsman, will the rhetorician be taken into counsel ? Surely not. For at every election he ought to be chosen who is most skilled ; and, again, when walls have to be built or harbours or docks to be constructed, not the rhetorician but the master workman will advise ; or when generals have to be chosen and an order of battle arranged, or a proposition taken, then the military will advise and not the rhetoricians : what do you say, Gorgias ? Since you profess to be a rhetorician and a maker of rhetoricians, I cannot do better than learn the nature of your art from you. And here let me assure you that I have your interest in view as well as my own. For likely enough some one or other of the young men present might desire to become your pupil, and in fact I see some, and a good many too, who have this wish, but they would be too modest to question you. And therefore when you are interrogated by me, I would have you imagine that you are interrogated by them. "What is the use of coming to you, Gorgias ? they will say about what will you teach us to advise the state ? — about the just and unjust only, or about those other things also which Socrates has just mentioned ? How will you answer them ? GORGIAS

Gor. And you will observe, Socrates, that when a decision has to be given in such matters the rhetoricians are the advisers ; they are the men who win their point. GORGIAS

Pol. And are the good rhetoricians meanly regarded in states, under the idea that they are flatterers ? GORGIAS

Soc. Why, did you not say just now that the rhetoricians are like tyrants, and that they kill and despoil or exile any one whom they please ? GORGIAS

Soc. Well then, I say to you that here are two questions in one, and I will answer both of them. And I tell you, Polus, that rhetoricians and tyrants have the least possible power in states, as I was just now saying ; for they do literally nothing which they will, but only what they think best. GORGIAS

Soc. Then you must prove that the rhetorician is not a fool, and that rhetoric is an art and not a flattery — and so you will have refuted me ; but if you leave me unrefuted, why, the rhetoricians who do what they think best in states, and the tyrants, will have nothing upon which to congratulate themselves, if as you say, power be indeed a good, admitting at the same time that what is done without sense is an evil. GORGIAS

Soc. How then can the rhetoricians or the tyrants have great power in states, unless Polus can refute Socrates, and prove to him that they do as they will ? GORGIAS

Soc. Not so, my simple friend, but because you will refute me after the manner which rhetoricians practise in courts of law. For there the one party think that they refute the other when they bring forward a number of witnesses of good repute in proof of their allegations, and their adversary has only a single one or none at all. But this kind of proof is of no value where truth is the aim ; a man may often be sworn down by a multitude of false witnesses who have a great air of respectability. And in this argument nearly every one, Athenian and stranger alike, would be on your side, if you should bring witnesses in disproof of my statement — you may, if you will, summon Nicias the son of Niceratus, and let his brothers, who gave the row of tripods which stand in the precincts of Dionysus, come with him ; or you may summon Aristocrates, the son of Scellius, who is the giver of that famous offering which is at Delphi ; summon, if you will, the whole house of Pericles, or any other great Athenian family whom you choose — they will all agree with you : I only am left alone and cannot agree, for you do not convince me ; although you produce many false witnesses against me, in the hope of depriving me of my inheritance, which is the truth. But I consider that nothing worth speaking of will have been effected by me unless I make you the one witness of my words ; nor by you, unless you make me the one witness of yours ; no matter about the rest of the world. For there are two ways of refutation, one which is yours and that of the world in general ; but mine is of another sort — let us compare them, and see in what they differ. For, indeed, we are at issue about matters which to know is honourable and not to know disgraceful ; to know or not to know happiness and misery — that is the chief of them. And what knowledge can be nobler ? or what ignorance more disgraceful than this ? And therefore I will begin by asking you whether you do not think that a man who is unjust and doing injustice can be happy, seeing that you think Archelaus unjust, and yet happy ? May I assume this to be your opinion ? GORGIAS

Soc. That is, he lives worst who commits the greatest crimes, and who, being the most unjust of men, succeeds in escaping rebuke or correction or punishment ; and this, as you say, has been accomplished by Archelaus and other tyrants and rhetoricians and potentates ? GORGIAS

Soc. And do not the poets in the theatres seem to you to be rhetoricians ? GORGIAS

Soc. Very good. And what do you say of that other rhetoric which addresses the Athenian assembly and the assemblies of freemen in other states ? Do the rhetoricians appear to you always to aim at what is best, and do they seek to improve the citizens by their speeches, or are they too, like the rest of mankind, bent upon giving them pleasure, forgetting the public good in the thought of their own interest, playing with the people as with children, and trying to amuse them, but never considering whether they are better or worse for this ? GORGIAS

Soc. Well, but if so, the truth is as I have said already, that in the Athenian State no one has ever shown himself to be a good statesman — you admitted that this was true of our present statesmen, but not true of former ones, and you preferred them to the others ; yet they have turned out to be no better than our present ones ; and therefore, if they were rhetoricians, they did not use the true art of rhetoric or of flattery, or they would not have fallen out of favour. GORGIAS

Well, but do rhetoricians, when they speak in the assembly, do nothing ? EUTHYDEMUS  

Soc. All of them sprang either from the love of a God for a mortal woman, or of a mortal man for a Goddess ; think of the word in the old Attic, and you will see better that the name heros is only a slight alteration of Eros, from whom the heroes sprang : either this is the meaning, or, if not this, then they must have been skilful as rhetoricians and dialecticians, and able to put the question (erotan), for eirein is equivalent to legein. And therefore, as I was saying, in the Attic dialect the heroes turn out to be rhetoricians and questioners. All this is easy enough ; the noble breed of heroes are a tribe of sophists and rhetors. But can you tell me why men are called anthropoi ? — that is more difficult. CRATYLUS  

Soc. Then I perceive that the Nymphs of Achelous and Pan the son of Hermes, who inspired me, were far better rhetoricians than Lysias the son of Cephalus. Alas ! how inferior to them he is ! But perhaps I am mistaken ; and Lysias at the commencement of his lover’s speech did insist on our supposing love to be something or other which he fancied him to be, and according to this model he fashioned and framed the remainder of his discourse. Suppose we read his beginning over again : PHAEDRUS  

Soc. It has. But I should like to know whether you have the same feeling as I have about the rhetoricians ? To me there seem to be a great many holes in their web. PHAEDRUS

Soc. I conceive Pericles to have been the most accomplished of rhetoricians. PHAEDRUS

Soc. I think that he has a genius which soars above the orations of Lysias, and that his character is cast in a finer mould. My impression of him is that he will marvelously improve as he grows older, and that all former rhetoricians will be as children in comparison of him. And I believe that he will not be satisfied with rhetoric, but that there is in him a divine inspiration which will lead him to things higher still. For he has an element of philosophy in his nature. This is the message of the gods dwelling in this place, and which I will myself deliver to Isocrates  , who is my delight ; and do you give the other to Lysias, who is yours. PHAEDRUS

And I am far from saying that wisdom and the wise man have no existence ; but I say that the wise man is he who makes the evils which appear and are to a man, into goods which are and appear to him. And I would beg you not to my words in the letter, but to take the meaning of them as I will explain them. Remember what has been already said, — that to the sick man his food appears to be and is bitter, and to the man in health the opposite of bitter. Now I cannot conceive that one of these men can be or ought to be made wiser than the other : nor can you assert that the sick man because he has one impression is foolish, and the healthy man because he has another is wise ; but the one state requires to be changed into the other, the worse into the better. As in education, a change of state has to be effected, and the sophist accomplishes by words the change which the physician works by the aid of drugs. Not that any one ever made another think truly, who previously thought falsely. For no one can think what is not, or think anything different from that which he feels ; and this is always true. But as the inferior habit of mind has thoughts of kindred nature, so I conceive that a good mind causes men to have good thoughts ; and these which the inexperienced call true, I maintain to be only better, and not truer than others. And, O my dear Socrates, I do not call wise men tadpoles : far from it ; I say that they are the physicians of the human body, and the husbandmen of plants — for the husbandmen also take away the evil and disordered sensations of plants, and infuse into them good and healthy sensations — aye and true ones ; and the wise and good rhetoricians make the good instead of the evil to seem just to states ; for whatever appears to a state to be just and fair, so long as it is regarded as such, is just and fair to it ; but the teacher of wisdom causes the good to take the place of the evil, both in appearance and in reality. And in like manner the Sophist who is able to train his pupils in this spirit is a wise man, and deserves to be well paid by them. And so one man is wiser than another ; and no one thinks falsely, and you, whether you will or not, must endure to be a measure. On these foundations the argument stands firm, which you, Socrates, may, if you please, overthrow by an opposite argument, or if you like you may put questions to me — a method to which no intelligent person will object, quite the reverse. But I must beg you to put fair questions : for there is great inconsistency in saying that you have a zeal for virtue, and then always behaving unfairly in argument. The unfairness of which I complain is that you do not distinguish between mere disputation and dialectic : the disputer may trip up his opponent as often as he likes, and make fun ; but the dialectician will be in earnest, and only correct his adversary when necessary, telling him the errors into which he has fallen through his own fault, or that of the company which he has previously kept. If you do so, your adversary will lay the blame of his own confusion and perplexity on himself, and not on you ; will follow and love you, and will hate himself, and escape from himself into philosophy, in order that he may become different from what he was. But the other mode of arguing, which is practised by the many, will have just the opposite effect upon him ; and as he grows older, instead of turning philosopher, he will come to hate philosophy. I would recommend you, therefore, as I said before, not to encourage yourself in this polemical and controversial temper, but to find out, in a friendly and congenial spirit, what we really mean when we say that all things are in motion, and that to every individual and state what appears, is. In this manner you will consider whether knowledge and sensation are the same or different, but you will not argue, as you were just now doing, from the customary use of names and words, which the vulgar pervert in all sorts of ways, causing infinite perplexity to one another. THEAETETUS