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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Tyranny v Philosophy: Part Two of Plato's Gorgias with Dr. Matthew Bianco
02:27:33
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A
Today on Stan the Great Books Podcast, we continue to look at the war between tyranny and philosophy over the souls of the young men in Athens by looking at the second part of Plato's Gorgias, the dialogue between Socrates and Polus. This dialogue, it's a long dialogue, but it only gets better the more you read. And in this section, Socrates will give us many outstanding claims that we really have to stop, contemplate and understand how we receive them. For example, he tells us not only are we not supposed to be a tyrant, but that the tyrant who seemingly has everything that they want, needs to be pitied. He also makes the extraordinary claim that the unjust man who is punished is happier than the unjust man, the tyrant who continues unpunished. How can he make such a claim? And we continue to argue and fight and have a war over what is the purpose of of rhetoric? Is it subject to philosophy? And if it is supposed to be subject to philosophy, what then is this rhetoric of Gorgias and Polus? Socrates will tell us that it's like pastry baking. Why does he make that claim? And before we dive into all of that with a wonderful, wonderful guest today, I just want to tell you as a little reminder that we are reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Christmas. So go pick it up. Check out our website, thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and going to be an excellent, excellent Christmas and New Year read. But today join us for an excellent conversation on Plato's Gorgias, particularly the second part, the dialogue between Socrates and Polus. Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We are recording on a beautiful afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, we are a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. For example, if you want to read Homer or Sophocles or Aristophanes, Dante, Plato or others, we have podcasts, videos and written guides to help you or your small group read these great books. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook or Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more information. Today we are continuing in our studies in Plato. Together we have read and discussed first Alcibiades, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaeto, the Meno, and last week we had a wonderful conversation on the first part of Plato's Gorgias with Athenian Stranger and Jonathan B. If you missed it, go check it out as today we are discussing the second part of the Gorgias, the discussion with Polus. Next week we'll be looking at the third and final part of the dialogue, the discussion with Callicles. And we'll be joined by Dr. Greg McBrayer of the New Thinkory podcast for that discussion today. To help guide us through the first part or the second part, I should say we are joined by an excellent guest, Dr. Matthew Bianco, who is the Chief Operations officer for the Searcy Institute, where he also serves as the head mentor in the Searcy Apprenticeship program. He has a PhD in humanities from Faulkner University's Great Books Honors College and wrote his dissertation on Plato's Republic and education. He is the author of Letters to My A Humane Vision for Human Relationships. And we should say, speaking of sons, that he's the father of Alec Bianco, who did a marvelous job explaining the swineherd to us in Plato's, excuse me, in Homer's Odyssey and helped us kick off our studies into Plato with a great conversation on first Alcibiades. So welcome Dr. Bianco.
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B
Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.
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A
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the Searcy Institute.
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B
Yeah, sure. The, the Searcy Institute, it's, it's a research institute, I guess, technically and with respect to classical education. So it's been around for I think officially 20 years, 23 years, like registered with, as a governmentally recognized institution or something, you know, but Andrew Kern had, had been doing stuff with it before that. And it's focus is on training teachers or homeschooling parents and on resources, curriculum, curriculum for students and then you know, training resources and educational philosophy resources, I guess for educators.
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A
Wonderful. Yeah, the Searcy Institute does good work. I follow you guys on X. If you guys don't follow them, please go follow them, find out more about their mission. But you, I'm hoping, right, that you have a particular love of Plato. Did your love of Plato endure doing a PhD dissertation on him?
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B
Yes. Yes. Yeah. Ironically, perhaps, or fortuitously, the, the I was. I. It's interesting because way before I ever even read any of Plato, I had a dream of naming my second born son Socrates and my wife shot it down. I don't even know why. Like I'd never read anything by Socrates, but just, you know, his reputation preceded him, I guess. Well, preceded him arriving to me and I Just thought he was a fascinating person and wanted to name my son after him. And my wife said no. So my son was named Morris after my great grandfather, which is great in its own right, but not Socrates. Then in 2011, I think I read Plato for the first time and I probably had, at that point I probably had developed a little bit of an anti Plato view because of the accusations of him being gnostic and anti material. And I'd kind of accepted some of those arguments that I'd heard and you know, amongst theologians or even classical educators. So I started reading him. But I think I discovered pretty quickly that the case was being overstated, if I can put it that way. And I found myself interested. And then in my PhD, I read a lot of Plato. Like I read every single dialogue at least once through. I read the Republic probably eight or nine times at that during that time, as well as, you know, a ton of other books on them on it and several other dialogues multiple times. And so I actually, I actually came to love Plato more during that time. The PhD actually helped me like appreciate Plato even more. So yeah, it didn't kill. It grew strengthened for me in this case.
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A
No, that's good. Sometimes academics has a way of being very, not only unerotic, but sometimes anti erotic in the way that it tends to approach wisdom and even the great books. So tell us a little bit about. I'm intrigued though by your PhD on Plato and education. So can you give us like a. What's a good summation of Plato's view of education?
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B
If I, if I tried to reduce it to one sentence. Basically my dissertation is what would education look like if we took the Republic seriously? But basically what I'm trying to do is take the Republic, which I view as a way of understanding the soul. I know, I know that historically, traditionally and probably the majority of the modern world views the Republic as a political text about the city. I view it primarily as a spiritual or a soulish text on the soul. And, and so there are, there are lots of places where Socrates makes it very clear that this aspect of the city is an analogy for this aspect of this aspect of the soul. But there are also a ton of places where he doesn't do that. He just says this is the rule for the city. This is what the city needs to look like. And he doesn't tell you what the counterpart for that is to the soul. So one of the things that I did in my dissertation is I went through all of those places and tried to identify what I think the Analogy is to the soul, then apply that to the classroom or apply that to education.
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A
That's beautiful. No, I would be in that same camp. I guess the way I was taught to read the Republic is that the politics of it are simply put there as an analog to the soul.
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B
Right.
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A
The structure of the soul, the beautiful soul is the primary there. What about did you incorporate like here on the podcast, as we've kind of ventured through Plato? If you asked me, we haven't done the Republic yet. We're planning on launching into that soon, though, but we haven't done it yet. So the two things that I've really looked at for education is one, First Alcibiades, which we launched our Plato studies, in which I found to be a phenomenal dialogue, and also the historic dialogue for kind of opening up the soul to receive philosophy and wisdom to know thyself. I found that very beautiful. And then two, one that I came to appreciate more that I didn't understand why it was associated with education. But then through having my betters on the podcast, I came to see it was the Mino and understanding the Minos. That and I think that St. John College, I listened to a lecture by Eva Brand does a really phenomenal job of you know, she makes very big claims that the Meno is like the secular Bible of St. John's College. And that made me go back and look at it. Like, I need to find something else about this. So any. Did you incorporate any of First Alcibiades or the MENO into your text as you kind of looked at education?
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B
I did. I definitely did the meno. I don't remember if. I don't remember incorporating anything from First Alcibiades. Maybe I did, but I don't remember if it was. It wasn't. It wasn't a large section of my dissertation at all. Maybe it was just like a line that I was using to support an argument or a footnote or something. He But I probably was also less familiar with Elsa with First Alcibiades at that point. Like, I've read it several more times since then. The But I agree. I think I like I typically try to start with First Alcibiades. Now if I'm teaching Plato to anybody or encouraging. In fact, we just finished a conference recently and I was sitting at one lunch, I was sitting next to a philosophy teacher from one of the local schools and he told me he was telling me about what he does with Plato, and I don't remember what grade it was, but it wasn't the seniors, I think it was younger students than that. And they, and he started with the Republic and, and I said, and then he was telling me that the response to the Republic was the students hated Socrates. They felt like he was a jerk. And the way he talks to whoever, I guess there's Glaucon Adamantus, whatever it was in the section they were reading. And I, and that was the first thing I said was I would recommend adding or, or replacing something with else with First Alcibiades and maybe even doing it first, because Alcibiades, the dialogue, I think the dialogue sets the stage for what Socrates whole project is in a way that helps you to see. Like it's about trying to, it's about trying to get, to make you receptive to philosophy or to get you to be receptive to philosophy. But also you can see very much more clearly, I think, in First Alcibiades that he is doing it from like he loves the person he's talking to, genuinely loves the person, especially Alcibiades. And that, that. What, what if you don't know that, then what can come across as acerbic or frustrating about Socrates? This tone, which, you know that. I mean, to some extent we're reading that into the text, right? Because we don't. It doesn't include emojis to tell us what his tone is, but thank God, imagine having to read the Republic with emojis mixed in. But anyway, so the tone, that context, I think softens the way we read his tone in some of those other dialogues. And then of course, the mino is just amazing. Like the entire question of what is virtue and can it be taught and how he ends the dialogue and the way he answers that question. And as frustrating frustrating as it is, like, how does, how does that answer actually comport with what's been being said all the way through? And you know, what is he doing there? It's. I don't know, it's brilliant. And I think it actually leads people to want to be taught virtue, even though he's saying, well, maybe, maybe you can't. So, yeah, it's kind of brilliant. And the respect that he has to not to not impose his views on the other person. Like, if they're not ready to receive it, then he doesn't, he doesn't just give it to them anyways because out of a sense of fear, like, if I don't tell my students the truth is X, then then not, not the social media platform, but the truth is A, then, then they won't know And Socrates doesn't operate from that, that place of fear. Right. If they're not ready for it, then it's. I don't know if he, I mean, he wouldn't say these words, I don't suspect, but it's pearls before swine in some sense, right. If they're not ready for it. And he's just not willing to do that. Where most. Well, a lot of people, a lot of educators, parents, you know that we're so, we're so afraid for our children that we will tell them when they're not even ready for it. And it just lands on deaf ears, or as my mom used to say, it goes in one ear and comes out right out the other. Right. That's my first impression of my mom.
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A
Well, that's great. That was wonderful. The. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think that he, in a lot of ways, what he's a master of is he's a master of understanding the soul and its knowledge and its desires. And he seems to be able to tailor his pedagogy, his teaching to that. And yeah, it leads us, I think, to some of the ironies that you pointed out. So in like First Alcibiades, he points out that he finally, through you know, this process gets Alcibiades to realize that he has no idea what justice is. Right. So this young man that was going to go talk to the whole assembly about whether or not they should go to war and do all this stuff doesn't actually know what justice is. And I think as a first time reader of First Alcibiades, particularly a first time reader Plato, you expect. Okay, great. This is where then Socrates explains justice to Alcibiades and he doesn't, he just like moves on. Right. And so the whole point is to get the students to understand they don't know what they think they know. And that kind of beautiful deconstruction becomes somewhat of a fertile soil then for the truth to kind of take root. But you're very much correct. Socrates doesn't rush it. I also think of the euthyphro. I think that I've come to appreciate more and more Socrates's kind of delicate teaching style or pedagogy that's in the euthyphro, that he really does care about euthyphro soul, even though euthyphro's I think, brain has melted by the end of the dialogue and he just wants to run away. I think that Socrates, because I think as you, when you read between the lines in that dialogue. You realize how much further Plato the author could have taken that dialogue. But it's very much capped. It's tailored pedagogically to the soul that's in front of him, which is Euthyphro, which then clearly Plato has some intentionality there. That, that's the lesson that the reader needs to know. But you can infer a lot more from the dialogue. So no, I think it is something to learn as a teacher. I think one of those brilliant moves he does at the beginning of first Alcibiades is he just pegs Alcibiades love of glory and honor. And he's like, hey, if you actually want glory and honor, like you, you need to listen to me. Because he can't say like you need to be a philosopher, you need to be wise. That doesn't mean anything, right, to that young spirited man. Right. So, no, I think, yeah, that's one thing I just really love about reading Plato. For those of us who have any kind of teaching capacity, I think there's like a deep mimetic power here about how he approaches that. And yes, he can be a godfly. And even in, I would say in the Gorgias, he's more antagonistic at times than we see him at other times, I think sometimes even being vulgar and crass and etc. I think there's pedagogical reasons for that, mainly because of the souls he's dealing with. But I think in large part he's a masterful teacher and I think he offers us a great skill set to mimic.
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B
It's an interesting point too, that, to think about the fact that Socrates is tailoring the conversation, his tone, his, his, the, the crassness or lack of crassness in his examples, the, the, the. The kinds of questions, the kind of answers he's willing to give to the person he's talking to may also be, I think, a really positive or a really significant argument with respect to kind of the academic understanding that the dialogues, like there's, the, there are early dialogues and mid dialogues and late dialogues. And, and when you, when you look at the arguments behind all of this, it seems to come down to this idea that, that these dialogues show show Socrates talking a certain way and then. Or, or about using certain kinds of arguments or making or, or developing certain points that he, that he then. Well, in the early dialogues they would say it's limited. And then, and then you see more of this other approach that comes in what they call the mid dialogues and more of this other approach. And they say that there's, that there's contradictions. And so these dialogues have to be written over here where they're more consistent with each other, but they're inconsistent with these ones over here. And so there's this chronological view guess about when he wrote each of them, which seems to leave out the argument or perhaps ignore altogether the argument that maybe he's talking to the people a certain way in these dialogues because of who he's talking to, not because he wrote him, because Plato wrote them at the beginning of his career. And then he's talking to people a different way over here because of who he's talking to, not because Plato wrote them at the end of his career kind of thing. So I don't know this. It's. I don't. It's just, it's all fascinating to me to, to think the, the I'm less interested in the development of Plato's philosophy argument and more interested in the Socrates as pedagogue or. Yeah. His pedagogical approach. Right. In, in the way he's talking to people. So just more interesting argument to me or any question.
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A
Yeah, no, I'm right there with you. Yeah. The whole trying to kind of reverse engineer how he wrote them by the words he uses in the dialogue doesn't. I think I've mentioned the podcast before. It gives me too much post traumatic stress thinking about schooling and the like, jedp theories on scripture and what they try and do. Right. It's like the same, it's the same spirit. So, yeah. What's interesting too here though, I think not necessarily that point, but before that, several of the points that you made and I made, it occurs to me that what we've slipped into, I think might be somewhat of a praise of Socrates. That is somewhat of an answer of what we're searching for here in the Gorgias, which is, does Socrates engage. Right. In a particular type of rhetoric? Right. Is he against all rhetoric or is there a certain type of rhetoric that he has learned to utilize for the sake of what's true, good and beautiful? Right. That's actually kind of subordinate to philosophy. And so it's kind of like in the. We'll talk about this. But it occurs to me that it's been somewhat similar to critiques that are made in the Republic where people say, you know, Socrates doesn't like poetry. He doesn't like anything poetic. He just wants, he just wants like this philosophy. And it's like, well, how, how do we know this? Well, oh yeah, I guess we're reading something poetic. We're reading a dialogue. And then in the dialogue we have these poetic stories, we have myths and things like this. So it seems to be like there you have to take that poetry and to use a Christian term, right, it has to be baptized into kind of a philosophic poetry. And I think that what we've been praising Socrates for and what I think we have to see in the Gorges too is that, you know, there's a, there's a rhetoric that's not really a real rhetoric. It's not even art that's divorced by itself that seems to have a teleology on gratification and these types of things. And he doesn't really ever. The, the counterpart is somewhat implied at times, but he's engaging contrary to them in a rhetoric that seems to be oriented under philosophy towards what's true, good and beautiful. Right. And we're seeing this in all the different dialogues. Maybe before though, we jump into the Gorgias just as like an aside. So you are Orthodox, correct?
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B
Yes.
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A
What Orthodox church are you a part of?
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B
Antiochian.
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A
Antiochian. Okay, wonderful. So is there like, just like since we have you on the podcast, you know, if someone asks me like in the, as a Roman Catholic, we always get pegged for Aristotle, right? So it's like, oh, how did you, how did you adopt Aristotle? And like the caricature is that, you know, the west ended up adopting Aristotle and the east ended up adopting Plato. So just as maybe an elevator pitch or for a first time question, how would you contextualize the relationship between the orthodox faith and Platonic philosophy?
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B
Yeah, it's probably not different from kind of your Augustinian Catholics. I mean, I, I know the Catholic Church is at least from the outside, the Catholic Church is primarily thought of as Aristotelian because of Thomas. And then, but then there are like people who, like, I counter Catholics who, who tell me they prefer Augustine to Thomas. And. And then there's a particular way of thinking about Catholicism and Christianity as a result of that. It's probably, it's probably very similar to that. I, I'm guess the, I mean, the orthodox take Plato's theology or philosophy, right? And then they baptize the language and you know, adjust it to suit, you know, theological ends. The most common things that I hear that I see or read referenced by the, you know, especially the early Church and the east is, you know, the understanding that Plato gives us of the soul, that there's an appetitive and a spirited And a noetic or intellectual component. And then the Eastern church sees that, but so does the West. That's not a difference really. And then the forms, they accept the forms as a thing, as objective realities, that this is where truth lies, obviously have to modify it, because in Plato, the forms are eternal. They can't be in Christianity because that would be. Then they would be God, right? They'd be eternally begotten, like the sun is. So they're, they're, they're thought of as either like thoughts, you know, in the mind of God, their thoughts that then he wills to. There has to be an aspect of that. He wills them to. To be spoken into existence or to be created. Otherwise, again, they would be. They would be eternal or they would be done out of necessity and God can't be necessitated, right? So, so they're, They're. He wills them. He wills them into existence by speaking them. So sometimes you'll hear, you'll see theologians like, I think Saint Maximus the Confessor does this. He calls them the thought wills or something like that. And so there's that going on to that orthodoxy kind of like, builds on. I remember one time, because Aristotle is somebody that frustrates me because of my preferences for Plato, right? And I get frustrated because I feel like Plato leaves me with questions that keep me in pursuit of the thing. And Aristotle. I'm not. Sorry, I don't want to turn this into. I'm not anti Aristotle, I like Aristotle. But when I read Aristotle, sometimes I get frustrated because it's like he's answering every question and then there's nothing left for me to play with, which is way, very, very bad, oversimplification of what Aristotle's doing because that's just completely unfair to him. But I remember one time thinking, like, yeah, the reason I like Plato better is because through Socrates, Plato teaches you to pursue a positive understanding of what the truth is, of what a thing is, a virtue, for example. And Aristotle teaches you to, to define it by the negatives, right? The, you know, Nicomachean ethics is the, you know, the excess and the deficiency of the thing is then this. Then you're left with whatever's left. That's the virtue, right? This, this royal road. And I remember, like, yeah, that's why Socrates is better than Aristotle or Plato's better than Aristotle. And then it must have been like that night or the very next day, I pick up a text by St. Gregory of Nyssa. And he specifically says the two best ways to understand virtue is to either pursue it positively and try to figure out what it is or pursue it negatively by figuring out what the excess and the deficiency is. And I'm like, oh, dang it. Okay, well, if there's room for Aristotle in St. Gregory of Nyssa, then there should be room for Aristotle for me. So. Yeah, but there's, there's a, There's a very interesting story from, to me in Orthodoxy because there was a time period after the schism when Plato became hated by the East. And in their stories of Platonic thinking, scholars or even theologians or even like bishops or monks or whatever, who were fleeing to the west for safety because they were being persecuted for their. For their Platonism. And there's a story of one particular monk who. Or philosopher, theologian. I think he's a philosopher. I don't think he was a churchman who fled to a monastery in the east and that the monastery was willing to take this guy in and protect him. It might have been at Mount Athos or something, I don't know. And he gets there, and I might have this backwards, I think. Well, anyways, there was a guy there at the monastery who was using Plato's name as a cursor. So every time, every time something bad happened, he'd be like, Plato. And then, and then when this guy would bring up Plato, he would say something like that. He'd be like, oh, yeah, Plato. And. But it was something like. But it was, it was more than just like he was saying hell or whatever it was. It was more like he was cursing Plato to damnation in the, in the way he was saying it. And then, and then he had a vision. This, this monk at the monastery who was doing this had a vision. And Plato appeared to him in the vision. And Plato asked him, why are you using. Why are you taking. Saying my name like that? And the monk said, because you're a pagan. You're a pagan and a blasphemer or whatever. And Plato said, I was. But when Christ descended into Hades and preached the gospel to those of us who were there, I was the first one to follow him. And then that, you know, that's. That's. That's the end of the story, right? Like, that's whatever. So I don't know. The east has had a love hate relationship with Plato over the centuries. I think mostly positive, but there's some pockets of time there where it was kind of negative.
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A
Yeah, no, I appreciate that context. I knew the back end of that story. I did not know the front end because I think that I tracked after the Council of Florence, which tried to have unity again, that's where a lot of those Plato scholars came back into the West. And that's where a lot of those Platonic texts. That's an early Renaissance time period. It leads back into that. And so you get a lot of this particularly Italian kind of Neoplatonic thinking. And some of those texts are amongst my favorite. And I think the one that I've read, the commentary on the Symposium, mentions Plato being in heaven. And, you know, we read Dante's Inferno for Lent. And that's one of the things I love Dante. That's one of the things I've always not liked about him, is that Plato and Aristotle and Socrates are in limbo. And I very much would have liked to see them, like, when they come out of hell and enter into purgatory, you know, the first person they see is a pagan suicide is Cato, which is a whole question of itself. But I've always thought that that would have been so much better. The first person they ran into was, like, Socrates or Plato or Aristotle, all three of them. Right, right, right. And so, I don't know. I. Yeah, I appreciate that. And, yeah, several of the things you said are very Augustinian. So kind of like, most famously, Augustine. Right. Roots the Platonic ideas in the divine mind, the Logos, the second person of the Blessed Trinity. And that's. He kind of gives him a new metaphysical address. And so he has some, like, very beautiful writings, I think, on that. And even my own spiritual maturation, when I came into the church from Protestantism, was very much focused on St. Thomas Aquinas, mainly because I really needed that relationship between faith and reason. I think it gave my thought a lot of structure. It was very beneficial. But as I've kind of grown older, I've come to really love Plato and that Platonic side, like, it's something that has really spoken to me, and I think there's a real beauty in teaching through narrative. You know, obviously, both Plato and our Lord do that. So. No, I appreciate you kind of sketching that out, because then I've come to recently, you know, read a lot of the Eastern fathers that really adopted this. So Gregory of Nyssa, St. John Climachus, St. Maximus the Confessor, Dionysius. Like, these guys are just beautiful, beautiful writers, and I. I appreciate what they're doing. Okay. But I could talk about that all day, but we are going to jump into the Gorgias, so why. Maybe, you know, we're. We're jumping in, so just remind everyone The Gorgias has three parts. Each part is longer than the part before it. So the shortest part is with Gorgias himself. Then we get a second kind of mini dialogue. And this is with Polus, this cult, a young horse that we'll have to kind of see the spirited individual. And then the last part, the longest part is actually with Callicles, which we'll be looking at next week. But maybe, like, from a high level, like, why is this a dialogue worth reading? It's a long dialogue. You know, it's. It's kind of hefty. It's hard to follow at times. Like, why. Why should we read the Gorgias? Like, what's the benefit here In.
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B
In the education world? It needs to be read because of the. Because of the discussion on rhetoric. What is rhetoric and classical education. Rhetoric being a huge component of classical education. So in classical education, the Gorgias should be read because of the question of rhetoric, right? Understanding rhetoric and the role that it plays in classical education and how it was thought of in the ancient world, specifically for Socrates and Plato, more generally speaking, just as human beings. I think we need to. I think we ought to read Gorgias because you're talking about. I mean, really, what it. What it boils down to is. Oh, man, this is interesting because I would have said prior to this, prior to preparing for this podcast, I would have said that it boils down. It's really boiling down to what is justice? And the conversation with Polus and Callicles is getting at this idea of justice, what justice is. This particular reading of it, though, what stood out to me is it's actually trying to get at what is happiness or what is the pleasure or the good or the happiness that we ought to be pursuing. And then. So then justice comes up because justice is. Comes up because it's. It's. It's get. It's helping them to get at how that happiness can be made possible, how the role that justice plays in that happiness, in acquiring happiness. The. So I think he's. I've. I'm seeing that more this reading than. Than I had in the past. So if I'm. If I'm. If I want to be. If I want to be a good person. Like. Like when the. When Polis brings up the example of Archimedes. No, what's the guy's name? The.
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A
The tyrant.
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B
The tyrant that took over Macedonia. Right? That guy, he tells this whole story and says, see, that guy's happy, right? And Socrates says, well, I can't answer that question. Until I know if he has knowledge and virtue, wisdom and virtue, and, and, and, and so this idea, like, he's challenging our notion of what happiness is, what the good is for each of us right through, through all this. But he gets there because of the conversation about rhetoric. So you get this, you get to have this conversation about rhetoric and what it is, and then, but then you end up getting to discover these deeper, more important things along the way. The Neoplatonists, at least one of the Neoplatonists had a list of 10 dialogues you should read that you have to read in a certain order before you could understand the other dialogues that remained. So you need to read this dialogue first in order to understand the second and the second to understand the third. But then once you've read all 10, you can read any other dialogue. So the Republic's not even in the list. 10. The Republic is one you're being prepared for. And Gorgias is on the list, I think, somewhere, maybe third or fourth. And the reason they give for the Gorgias being in that spot is because Gorgias helps you understand, understand yourself in community. Right. This, this external, like, conversation that you. That you might have to have through rhetoric or whatever. So injustice. So the. That's the Neoplatonist argument for. That's their answer to your question, I guess. Or at least one of them.
- [36:25]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's very good. I. You know what, last week we kind of talked about, and something that stood out to me when I read it this time is that the dialogue starts with a reference to war. And, you know, I think we always need to pay attention to how Plato opens dialogues. Like, how does he create the setting, even, like, mentally, like, intellectually, what words are being used, like, what's the tone of a lot of people. As I've already mentioned, the Gorgias has an antagonistic tone to it. I mean, this is. We'll see. Callicles is like, I'm going to punch you in the face. And like, it becomes progressively more even vulgar. And I think even with Polus, we'll talk a little bit about this, but I think there's like, a certain rhetoric that Socrates adopts that. That really is kind of pricking Polus. Like, he knows how to prick him in a very particular way, which is somewhat funny when you read the dialogues.
- [37:14]
B
Yeah.
- [37:14]
A
And so, you know, I've, I've kind of see it as. Yeah, it's a war. I think in a lot of ways, it's a war for the souls of the young. Men in Athens. And I think that as you pointed out, there's this kind of arc through the dialogue of like, what is what. What's the point of rhetoric? Like, what's its purpose, what's its teleology, et cetera. And that really then leads into a question of, well, what it. What does it mean to be happy? What is a good life? Because rhetoric for them, for this kind of Gorgias's rhetoric, Polus's rhetoric is basically subordinate to gaining pleasure. And so this immediately leads into all these dialogues of the life of a tyrant. And is the life of a tyrant good or bad? And so, no, I think it's a beautiful dialogue and I understand they have subtitles and stuff like this, but like saying the Gorgias is about rhetoric is very flat. It actually, Peter Kreeft will talk about that. It has all the components of the republic, but without the weird politics because it kind of mands. Right. Callicles is kind of like, what's his name? Thrasymachus at the beginning. The myth that we get at the end of Callicles dialogue I actually like better than the myth of er. It just really stood out to me. There's some things that I think one dovetail really well in the Christianity, but just. It's a beautiful, beautiful myth. I think that's really well put together. So no, I think there's a war going on in this dialogue. And that's one thing that I've also been thinking about is that what has occurred to me, and also through several of the good guests that we've had on the podcast, is I've always kind of viewed nihilism as like a modern phenomenon. Like this is. This is something that's in a post Christian world because we've lost faith in the Logos and so we don't see reality as intelligible anymore. And when the intellect doesn't have truth, the spiritedness of our soul doesn't have anything, doesn't have courage, doesn't have anything, that there's nothing worth dying for, if you will. And so it just kind of falls into either this like hedonism or just like this broad nihilism that nothing matters. I think that one thing I've come to appreciate is that the young men of Athens are actually very nihilistic, that they've actually like, they don't really believe in the pantheon anymore. They want to be the tyrant. They want to be the great king of Persia who has all this power. And here's this old man Socrates being like, oh, no, it's actually better to suffer an injustice than to commit one. And you're insane. Who would want to do that? So I think as a broad scale, yeah, I think the Gorgias has a lot of depth and a lot of depth that you can miss, particularly if you're reading it quickly. So I've really appreciated kind of coming.
- [39:51]
B
Back to this dialogue that's interesting because it's kind of forecasting what happens with Christianity in the early empire. Right. That Christianity had two options. One would be to try to take the reins of power and overthrow the empire and the emperor and then become that or suffer injustice. And they chose to suffer. In fact, when Christianity does ascend to any kind of power, it's through the conversion of an emperor, not. Not through tyrannically overthrowing him and imposing Christianity on the empire. So interesting. He's describing what Christianity ends up being. Well, 500 years beforehand.
- [40:43]
A
Yeah. And there's a certain magnanimity that comes out of that. So it does have a certain mimetic power. It has a certain draw in to convert souls when you see someone that can suffer with such nobility. So no, I think again, this is going back to like our earlier comments. I think Plato dovetails really well into Christianity for multiple reasons. Maybe just kind of like pushing us along. So maybe just as a brief reminder, like who's Polus? So we should probably. So he's a. He's a student of Gorgias. He's older, we think student, we think young man. He's a bit older, but he's younger than Socrates. He's a teacher of rhetoric in his own. So he's written books on rhetoric, these kind of things probably. I mean this pun is made in the dialogue too. It's not terribly esoteric. But his name means colt like a young horse. And so he. And he acts cultish or cult esque and so he tends to be a bit spirited, if you will. You know, one of the theories I'm playing out in my head, and it might be too simplistic, but you know, the tripart soul for Plato, at least broadly speaking, or at least the one that's adopted into Christianity from the Platonic tradition, is that you have your intellect that seeks truth, the spirited part, the thumotic part, that seeks like a nobility and then you have the appetitive that seeks pleasure. And so, you know, last week we kind of looked at, you know, in the Phaedrus, which can be kind of accompanied with this dialogue because it's also about rhetoric, but then has A little bit more. The Phaedrus is very beautiful. It has it's talk about love and eros and beauty and these kind of things. And the Gorgias is like an ugly version of that. But one thing about in the Phaedrus is that Athenian stranger last week when he was on, he talks about that rhetoric has to be tailored to the souls in front of it. And our earlier dialogue that you and I had was basically several examples how we think Socrates does this really well. And so one kind of maybe simplistic mapping that I'm trying to track is, you know, do these three characters somewhat serve as broad analogues for the three parts of the soul? And so Gorgias is kind of like this intellect. It's corrupted, but it's this intellect. But he's controlled. He's somewhat bridled in his responses. He's kind of a gentleman, but it's. He has a corrupted intellect of, you know, what his rhetoric is actually aimed for and what it's producing. And so then it seems like two on the nose that that in polis, the culture that acts like this horse is too spirited. It's a spirited part of the soul. And we'll get into that. That I, I think that Plato might tailor, or Plato, Socrates, tailor some of his rhetoric here in a really comedic way to kind of prick Polus and then Callicles as the appetitive. Because I mean, he's, he's in an unabashedly ashamed, like unashamed.
- [43:30]
B
Right.
- [43:31]
A
Competitive, like. I know, yes. You know, yes, Socrates, I do want to become a tyrant. That's the whole point. I'm studying this rhetoric. So it might be too simplistic, but it's kind of a simple mapping. And so I like to play with that as we kind of work through polis to see if some of that rhetoric here is kind of tailored to that spirited soul that would be drawn to rhetoric.
- [43:55]
B
Would you get from Gorgias then? Gorgias would then have to be the intellect. Right. But Socrates is also the intellect.
- [44:06]
A
Well, I think Socrates would be the intellect proper. So if you wanted to kind of play this out, you'd have, you'd have. Socrates actually represents all three, but properly ordered under justice. So this is what philosophy does. It makes your soul beautiful. So Socrates is the one that has the beautiful intellect, the beautiful thematic and the beautiful appetitive. He understands how this works. And so then as he's dialoguing with these other people, he can shift. Kind of like we talked about with first Alcibiades or with Euthyphro, he understands what their actual desire is, and so he tries to tailor his rhetoric to their particular desires. So maybe just to play a card here, you know, Polus, again, cult spirited, et cetera, that seems kind of on the nose, but it really. The first thing that caught my attention is in this dialogue, as part of the dialogue with Polus is that Socrates is a bit bombastic, meaning that he. He at times won't allow Polis to get a foothold in the argument. He kind of throws out these statements that are really hard to understand. And Polis has to ask for clarity. He doesn't allow him to really get a foothold. And then you have this, like, really comedic part where he's like, oh, yeah, by the way, the rhetoric that you love so much, you know what it's like? It's like pastry baking. And the thing is, that's such an ignoble comparison. You know what you're like. You're like a pastry chef. And it seems to me like there, I mean, imagine like how he counsels Alcibiades. And first Alcibiades, like, he knows how to tailor these things. And so to tell Polus, who, even if you take him as an analog or not to the soul, whatever, he comes off as spirited in this dialogue, I think obviously they're playing with his name, etc. I understand this could be kind of a simple pedagogical mapping, but I think it holds in certain ways. Like it, you see how his rhetoric there brilliantly pricks Polis by saying, like, yeah, the thing you do is very ignoble and not spirited by using this kind of funny, but just like, very domesticated and soft example for that. So, no, I think that. And then we'll see that with Callicles too, is that. I think that, as you mentioned, I think happiness is the main motif. But Socrates understands then how these erotic desires are supposed to be satiated. So the intellect is supposed to satiate on truth, the spirited is supposed to satiate on nobility, and the appetitive can satiate on pleasure. There are good pleasures, right? But they have to be well ordered. The soul has to be well ordered. The parts of the soul have to have proper attachments that are governed by reason for this erotic longing to actually have proper, you know, rectitude, if you will. And so I think what you see then in this dialogue a lot of times is a rhetoric that when connected to philosophy, when purified, or use a Christian term, baptized by philosophy, then it has those erotic Longings can be properly ordered. And then there's like a certain fecundity that comes from this because you learn how to live a good and happy life. Right. According to Plato. Whereas if you have a rhetoric that's detached from philosophy, you can see then, and it's telling you to satiate all these desires, all it's telling you is to go out and satiate. Then you see really easily how that unbridled rhetoric very easily leads to tyranny, like, immediately, because there's nothing to control your appetites. And so it's interesting, like, as we kind of move through this, that callicles really, then is at the end that, like, yeah, I'm unashamed. This is exactly what my rhetoric's for, is to do that Polis, maybe more so. And Gorgias, the least so is willing to, you know, admit that. So it's just something as. That I've been tracking as we kind of move through this that I'm using maybe as a. I think last week I called it a pedagogical foothold to something like to start to grab onto the dialogue and see if this plays out.
- [48:00]
B
I like, I like, I like the. That distinction you're making between Gorgias and Socrates, because Gorgias, it seems like Gorgias kind of comes across as just like a. An intellect that's just kind of out there. It's not. It's not being moved by its appetites or its. Or its passions. Right. It's just. It's just. It just. It's just always calculating and logicking and then. And so it's not. It's not moved. It doesn't have the will to move the person toward anything. It just thinks about everything and is. Is perfectly comfortable writing. You know, Gorgias is famous in real. In real life, I mean, in the dialogue, obviously, but outside of that, for his encomium to Helen or for Helen, where he makes a defense of Helen and. And it's basically like Helen is. Helen did what she did by going off with Paris, and that's okay because there's no truth kind of thing. And. And like, he's perfectly comfortable saying something like that because there's nothing that moves him toward the true, the good or the beautiful. She just thinks about that kind of stuff. Whereas. But then. But then he becomes a teacher of people who are moved by their passions in the case of polis, and he's. And. Or that are moved by their appetites in the case of callicles, and doesn't even realize what he's enabling them to do by teaching them to use the intellect the way he is, so then they can then use their intellect to bring about the tyrannical power they're in pursuit of, the dictatorial power they're in pursuit of. Right. Whereas he doesn't really go that. He doesn't move in that direction himself because he doesn't care. But they have that, that. Those desires, those passions, and. And. Okay, well, that's up to them. Like the boxing coach who tells somebody, you know, teaches somebody how to box, and that guy goes in boxes and kills somebody. Well, that's on him. Not me, not coach. Right.
- [50:12]
A
Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned that. Cause that's. That's another kind of motif that I'm trying to play out as we kind of work through the dialogue is what does Gorgias know? So my first kind of read through of this in preparation for these conversations is I found very much my. I guess, intuition. I mean, this is a narrative. So some things you pull out by intuition was that Gorgias has not fully understood what he's doing. He doesn't, like. I think he internally clearly has adopted some type of barriers, modifications, or, excuse me, moderations on his appetites, because that's how he presents himself. He's very much a gentleman, et cetera. And so one of the questions I had was like, what does he know? And what is he. I guess again, to pull from first, Alcibiades, the beginning of wisdom is to know thyself. To what degree does Gorgias actually know thyself? Because my. My first read was, is that he's not really aware that the type of rhetoric that he's passing on is creating little tyrants. And because I think my. My point here would be, is going back to an earlier dialogue or discussion that we had, is that Socrates. Socrates never seems to actually just be like, I want to defeat you in an argument. He seems to truly care for the soul. And so one of the arguments here, I think, is like, what soul is actually being cared for? And it seems that when Socrates dialogues with Polus and then also later with Callicles, that one of his intentions, Socrates intention, is to then show Gorgias the type of man he is producing. Like, here is your student, and here is his caliber. And Polus is kind of in the middle. I think Polis several times in the dialogue is logically brought to a conclusion. And then when asked to affirm the conclusion, even after affirming all the previous premises, Polus bucks it and says, no, this. And kind of reverts back to this kind of testimonial, you know, rhetorician argument against it, whereas Callicles won't even give Socrates an inch. And so I've really kind of questioned, like, you know, is Socrates trying to show Gorgias here, can Gorgias be redeemed and say, hey, do you realize, you know, ultimately that you're producing someone like Callicles that just wants to be a tyrant? When he says that with no veneer and everything just removed, Is that something that you're okay with? Because I contrast with, you know, last week when I dialogued with this, there was. That was not. The predominant view is that Gorgias is fully aware that he is producing little tyrants, and he's just better at this kind of self discipline, self moderation. So he, internally, he is like Callicles. He is like Polus. He wants to satiate his appetites. He uses rhetoric to control. But he's. He has that gentleman's veneer. He understands how you have to present these. The tyrant isn't very good. If the tyrant comes out or the wannabe tyrant comes out and says, I want to be a tyrant. That's not a great way to be a tyrant. So Gorgias is a tyrant. He's just as tyrannical in his soul as Callicles is, but he's more refined. And so that's one of the questions I have too, as I read through this is, what does Gorgias really, like, does he know thyself? Does he really understand what he's doing? Or is he still not aware of it? And so he's ignorant, and so he has to know thyself. And Polus and Callicles are going to serve as, like, mirrors to his soul to understand what he's doing. Because one of the things that really occurs to me through this is that he interjects, like, sometimes the dialogue would have just ended and Gorgias says, no, no, no, no. Like, keep going. We want to hear this. And it's hard for me to understand. Again, it might be my own intellectual deficiencies, but it's hard for me to understand. If Gorgias is internally just a tyrant, who knows clearly what he's doing? I don't know why he wants to hear this. Continue. I don't understand, like, why. Because he actually made, to his own detriment, to show that his students are this open. It seems counterintuitive. So that's one of the things I'm struggling with, is like, what. What is. How does Gorgias know. Like, what does he know? And is the dialogue with polus and callicles serving like a pedagogical purpose to maybe convert Gorgias to a proper use of rhetoric?
- [54:36]
B
Yeah, yeah. I kind of lean towards that. That latter view that Gorgias doesn't actually know himself and probably doesn't. Doesn't realize it and. And would. And when he does come to realize it, or if he were to come to realize it, he wouldn't necessarily hold himself accountable for it. Sorry. Realize that he's creating tyrants or want. It would be tyrants. And if he did come to realize that, I don't think he would. It would matter too much to him because he wouldn't hold himself responsible for it. But it would only matter to him insofar as it would affect his business if the. If the community around him was bothered by it. Yeah, I don't, I don't. That's kind of the. The approach. My perspective at this point. I'm with you, though. Like, what am I. Am I missing something that might show me this. That there's a different. That. That it's the other. The other view. What. One of the thing that's interesting to me about Plato and I. I love watching this, especially when there's more than one interlocutor, because there's always something going on there. So there's a. There's a dialogue on courage and I think it's called laches. L, A C H E S Laches. And the. There's two guys that Socrates dialogues with, and they're talking. It comes out in the course of the dialogue that there's two ways that we can. We can have an opinion about something. We can believe something. One is we have an empirical experience with it. We've seen it. But he would still call that just. I believe this to be the case because knowledge is something you get from the forms themselves. Right. So empirically knowing something is really just belief. I have a belief about trees because what I saw. And then the other one, of course, is from. Is something you receive based on authority from another person. So if you tell me something and you're the expert on that and I accept. Or even if you're not. If I accept it, I'm accepting it authoritatively. I don't actually know it for myself. And then. And then in this dialogue, one of the guys he talks to presents his definition of courage. And then his entire defense of what courage is comes from his experiences in battle. He's empirically seen courage to operate in this way. And then, and then when he switches to the other guy, everything is presented as I've been told. This is what courage is from smart people. Therefore this is what courage is. And in fact, one of the, one of the people that he uses, he uses Socrates definition, gives Socrates definite back to him. It doesn't say I got this from you, but gives it back to him. And Socrates still won't accept it because. Won't let him have it because he doesn't know it for himself. He's simply accepting it on authority. And so the. In that. And in that diagonal, there's another one just like it about it with a different topic, but it's the same thing. The two characters both operate from this, this perspective here. It's not about how they know it, it's about how they're, how they're. How they're being driven by it. Right. So then there's this sense of, of what part of the soul is governing, how I'm. How I'm being, how I'm using this. And so the, the idea that one of the characters, that there's three characters and three interlocutors and one of them is driven by his appetites and one of them is driven by his passions or his spirit. Right. And then the other one is driven by his intellectual. But, but, but you're supposed to be driven by your intellect. So there has to be something deficient in that because Socrates is the one that. It's the whole soul. This is what it looks like when the whole soul is driven. Is driving. Being driven by the intellect. So I don't know that. That kind of makes me think that the deficiency in Gorgias has to be like he's just thinking and there. And he's not, he's not thinking. He's not thinking teleologically. Right. He's just no end. There's no wisdom or virtue he's trying to get to. He's just thinking. Whereas if he, if he secretly wanted to be a tyrant, then it wouldn't be. He wouldn't be demonstrating a deficient. We wouldn't have that third part of the soul being being on display, I guess. So that, that too makes me lean toward the, that second view.
- [59:15]
A
Yeah, that's a good point. I appreciate you kind of mapping that out. So let's kind of, let's push into the text and kind of root and kind of anchor.
- [59:23]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [59:24]
A
The things that we've kind of talked about. So polis. You know, I kind of famously. So polis. This is at 462B. Asked Socrates what type of craft rhetoric is now part of the. You have to laugh when you read the dialogue. So I love all these things where he's like, well, you can ask me questions or whatever. Then Polis is like, well, what do I ask you? He's like, well, ask me this. And he, like, does it. And then, like, I just, I just. You gotta see the back and forth of this and like, the comedy of it, I think.
- [59:49]
B
Yes.
- [59:49]
A
And part of that is what I was mentioning earlier, is that he seems to keep. He wants to keep Polus on his toes. He doesn't. He doesn't really like to give him a solid footing in this. But he asks him, like, what type of craft rhetoric is. And I think somewhat famously, Socrates, this is 462C. You know, he replies like, well, it's not a craft. Which again, is just a funny answer because he posed the question, but it's not a craft.
- [60:13]
B
Right?
- [60:13]
A
It's a. It's a knack. It's an experience. This. It's. It's not really. It's not a craft. It's not a true art. And I think that too, we've already kind of addressed this, not directly, but in our speech is. I do think there's like a misread here, or what I would call a misread, similar to like reading the Republic and being like, oh, clearly Plato's against poetry. And so you read this and say, oh, look, Plato's clearly against rhetoric. He doesn't even think it's an art. And so we read Aristotle. The first thing Aristotle says is that rhetoric is an artist. I think that's a mystery because again, I think we have to be careful that at least how I read this, kind of dovetailing what we've already talked about into the text, is that what he's looking for is a rhetoric that actually has its teleology, its purpose, in truth, it's subordinate to philosophy. We'll see this like a wonderful statement. He really plays this out clearly, I think he doesn't give the answer, but he gives all the parts of the answer. And so I think when he critiques here, I would say is not rhetoric per se, but this is Gorgias's rhetoric. This is Polus's rhetoric. The rhetoric that they traffic in is not a true art. And I think we have to look at that contrast, that there is a rhetoric that Socrates is using. Clearly, he's using rhetoric that is true and good and beautiful and is subordinate to philosophy and helps us understand these things. But when he's critiquing here, that's not an art. Seems to be Hollis's rhetoric. Because there's distinction. Because I think he kind of. He. He points this out very clearly in 462C. You know, he points out the telos, like, what's the purpose of this experience? Or nack, it's gratification and pleasure. That's what it actually has its teleology in. Regardless if you have a good veneer or you're more gentleman like Gorgias, or midway, like polis, or you're just a complete, you know, unashamed tyrant wannabe like Callicles. The rhetoric that you're trafficking in, that's not an art, has its teleology, its purpose. And the rhetoricians satisfaction and pleasure, and that what that is, is not a true art.
- [62:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. The, the. I think it's interesting because I. I think it's an interesting point because I think from the context of the Platonic corpus and, and then what we know about those guys, the rhetor, is that I don't think rhetoric existed in that day, at least not popularly, the way Aristotle describes it a few decades later. Because here what you have in the first discussion with Gorgias was just the two of them talking. Gorgias and Socrates points out a rhetoric that is devoid of that philosophical knowledge, right? What is. If I'm gonna. If I'm gonna give a speech on what justice is, I need to know what justice is. Not just. I'm not just trying to move my. Move my audience. And then in the Phaedrus, when they, you know, Socrates gives his three speeches to Phaedra to. Yeah, to Phaedrus. And then when they're analyzing the speeches afterwards and he's analyzing them for their rhetoric, it's the same thing. He only talks about the arrangements and the elocution. There's no. So, you know, Aristotle gives us five canons of rhetoric, right? The invention, where you're trying to discover the truth of the thing and then arrangement, you're ordering that those ideas and then allocution, you're, whatever, expressing them. And then memory and delivery in Socrates, description of rhetoric in Phaedrus, there's no invention. There's no trying to figure out what the possible answers are. And then. And then just discern or determine which one is correct or which one is true. And then Gorgias admits that he doesn't, you know, if his students don't know something, he doesn't Give it. He doesn't tell. Teach it to them. That's not his job. He only teaches them to arrange an eloquent memorize and deliver. So I think what, what Socrates is attacking is this kind of rhetoric that only has the final four canons. There is no first canon. Or it's. Or it's just being ignored, perhaps, like it existed as, as a thing, but nobody was doing it. And so, and so Sarge is saying, I think, to your point, right, that, that you have to have. You have to have philosophical knowledge before you can know what to say rhetorically. So in some sense, Aristotle kind of saves rhetoric for us. I think Socrates critique of rhetoric is correct. Like the classical education world that I'm in ought to accept his arguments and then recognize that invention is a thing that Aristotle gives us or revives for us, whichever. That saves. That saves rhetoric as a. As an actual art. The. So, yeah, so there's definitely a distinction between, like, Gorgias's rhetoric or the popular rhetorical community's rhetoric versus what Socrates is trying to do. Same thing with the poets, right? There's got to be this philosophical foundation behind it. But there's something else you said that I want to touch on about. About. Because Polis begins by asking questions, right? Socrates gives him the choice. No speeches, but you can ask questions or you can answer questions, whichever you choose. And Polus chooses to ask the questions. But then immediately Socrates, like you said, Socrates is like, okay, well, ask me this. No, no, you need to ask me this. No, you can't skip to that yet without asking me this. It's kind of. Kind of hilarious and humorous. But what stood out to me there is that Hollis wants to give speeches because speeches get honored, right? If I give a speech, then people clap, applaud, throw flowers at me. I don't know, whatever they do, right? And so there's honor, which is what the spirited cult wants. He wants to be honored for his speeches. And then Socrates says, no, no, no, you need to ask questions. And then is willing to teach him how to ask questions. And he's moving. He's moving polis with that move. He's moving polis from engaging him spiritedly to engaging him intellectually. Right? The mind is now being activated, and Socrates has to continue helping him to do that. Obviously, Polis is still a spirited person. So even when he's thinking, he's thinking spiritedly. The spirited is still kind of governing the intellect, but he's accessing the intellect. And Socrates is. And when. And Socrates is like, I think you said this earlier in the call, that in the recording that Socrates will sometimes say something that Polis doesn't understand. He's always calling up to this higher level. And then Polis will. Polis will wisely. This is good that Polis does this. Right. But Paulus will say, I don't. I don't understand that. And then. And then Socrates will kind of reach his hand down and help pull him up to that. To that thing, you know, and so there's this training of the intellect in Polis. I've. I so, so wish that we knew historically what happened to Polis. Like, does he leave this conversation and actually become more philosophical and a wise and noble member of the community? Or. Or does he continue down the Gorgian path? But I don't think we have. I couldn't find anything that we have on him other than Aristotle mentions him in one of his books.
- [68:05]
A
Yeah, that's a good question. Yes, we have that with a lot of people. We always wonder what happened to Euthyphro. Yeah, he leaves. Is there a conversion? Very rarely do we get in first. Alcibiades. We see the conversion in the text, like, oh, yes, Socrates, I will follow you. And X, Y and Z. Right. No, it's really good. I think those are really good points. The. Well, kind of like, to that point of, like, tailoring the rhetoric, this is where I just. I just found this, like, very funny. And so he. Socrates, this is in 462D. He compares Polus's rhetoric to pastry making. This is, again, I think he's picking, like, a very ignoble, like, soft example to be like, you know what you're doing? You're like a pastry chef. Because I think, again, he's pricking that spirited part, because, again, the spirited part of the soul is perfected by courage. And so, like, you know, we see, you know, kind of the Thumas incarnate is someone like Achilles, right? So here's this, like, spiritedness that just conquers. They love nobility, because nobility of the soul typically, you know, will bring things like victory, and victory brings honor and glory and this kind of type of immortality that you can achieve. And so to take all of that and be like, you know what you're like. You're like a pastry chef. That's what you're like, right? You just see then that he's just pricking him. He's. He's trying to kind of deconstruct even how Polus kind of views himself. And again, at 463, just to track it, we get Gorgias interjecting. And again, this is where I think we have to ask that pedagogical question, like, what is the purpose of Gorgias interjecting, like, why. Why does Gorgias seem to want this conversation to continue and this conversation to be refined? And I think that's part of that question of how does Gorgias see himself and what is his approach to this dialogue? Is there any kind of good faith approach that Gorgias is giving us? But even, even Socrates too, to keep building on some examples of what we've talked about already in 463e, Socrates very much tells us explicitly that he's tailoring his rhetoric to this cult here, right? To polis. It's very spirited. So maybe let me chart out, because he gives this kind of like, good of the soul, good of the body distinction down by 464B. And so he says that there's goods of the soul. This is like, well, it's politics, right? So there's politics, legislation and justice. And then he says there's goods of the body and he actually thinks these correspond to one another, which is really fascinating. Where politics is like an unnamed good, some kind of genus there that would have both of them, but we don't really have a name for that. I don't know if there's, if he pulls a name in any other dialogue, but here he doesn't have a name for this genus that would be similar to politics. But then underneath it you have gymnastics, which is similar to legislation and medicine, which is similar to justice. And so these are things that we pursue. You know, so for the good of the soul, we want good politics, good legislation, good justice for the good of the body. You know, we want gymnastics and medicine, which are both part of, you know, some unnamed genus that he kind of parses out. And clearly what he's setting up here, which I think is really fascinating is the, the contrary to this, the corruption of this seems to be this bl. Broad category of flattery.
- [71:26]
B
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. The, the coming. Going back to that connection, right? That, that, that rhetoric is for pleasure and instant immediate or gratification. I think it's word. And so then, so then pastry, baking. My, my translation says cookery, which I've, I like every time I've taught, taught it with the translation cookery or cooking, students get mad. There's no way cooking is flattery. Cooking, Cooking is good for you. It's for the health of the body. Like. Yeah, but when we practice Cookery, we're talking about making food that's pleasurable and gratifying. Right? But anyways, they get frustrated by that. Pastry baking is a little bit, a little bit more obviously pleasure inducing. So I think that would be less problematic for people. And then, and so there's this sense of like, I don't have to actually be healthy physically. I, I could cover it up, cover up my lack of health. Like that's what cosmetics is doing, right? It's like it's, I'm, I'm covering myself up dressing in a way that, that hides my unhealthiness. And then, and then pastry baking or cookery makes me feel like I'm making myself healthier but by just eating fancy foods. And that's what, what, what he'll go on to say, I guess I'm jumping ahead. But he's going to go on to say that's what sophistry and rhetoric do, right? They allow us to act like we're being just the soul is just when it's not. I don't know. Sorry. Sorry for jumping out there, but I don't know what. I don't know if I can interpret Gorgias's interjection as a good faith attempt other than the fact that he did it like, that he's asking the question and that he appears to want the conversation to go on because, because when he does it, Polis is kind of trapped, right? Like he doesn't want to answer the question or whatever, or can't answer the question. And Gorgy says, like, ask me the question and let's keep just going. So I think that itself is somewhat of an indication. But I also found it interesting that Socrates, he doesn't tell us he does this here like he does later with Polis, but he actually tailors the message to Gorgias like he's, he's very clear. He says it in two different ways in, in that section. What are we in 463 he says there's nothing admirable. If this is 463A, there's nothing admirable about the activity, one of whose branches is what I call rhetoric. And then, and then in his next response, in the middle of there there, he says, I lost it. There's another place where he says something like, well, at the beginning of that next response, he says, in my opinion, Gorgias, there's, there's. He's kind of softening the blow. Like, I don't understand rhetoric because you didn't answer my questions. But but because I don't understand rhetoric, I'm just going to tell you what I'm. What I happen to think of it at this moment. And, and it's, it's like even there, it's, it's like he's calling Gorgias out to think about what rhetoric is and explain that to me. Enter into it in a, in a more, in a more, in a more good faith way. Right. To, to actually have this conversation. So he's all, yeah, again, I think he's tailoring his responses to try to provoke the thing that that person needs, but he can't force it on them. Right. He doesn't. He tries. And if they don't do it, they don't do it.
- [75:17]
A
Yeah, very true. Yeah. And it's part of the, that's part of the problem that we saw in the Mino is, is, can things be taught? And is there a, is there a receptivity that the student has to have that really only the student can move into? The teacher can't. The teacher can't make someone virtuous. There has to be some reciprocal nature there. Yeah. So kind of. Yeah. What you Talked about on 4 of 66A is he lists these goods and then flattery is like the corruption, the false. It's like, it's interesting because it's not just the, it's not simply the corruption of the good. It's a false attempt to achieve the good through some kind of disordered means. Right. So gymnastics, right. That purifies the body. It makes us beautiful. Right. We think of these like Greek statues and cosmetics is kind of the false version of that. Right. A false beautification of the body. Legislation is the good. He says sophistry there is the false way to get it. Medicine is a good pastry, baking is bad. I love it. Like earlier, it's at 464d when he gives this example of like, okay, if you have a crown of people and one's the doctor trying to give medicine and the other one is the baker who has all these lovely pastries, right? Like, who do you think the crowd is going to listen to? Like, who, who will the crowd follow? Which is a one. It's just another example of why the mob is very untrustworthy. And then last one is, which is, you know, obviously he's setting up these as analogous to the conversation at hand, which is one of the goods is justice and it's kind of flattery. The false way of get this is this rhetoric which I put in scare quotes. And I'll kind of. So here, here's where I would really maybe this, this might be the hill that I would die on. Which is probably imprudent in any kind of Platonic dialogue, right? So imprudently I'm going to die on this hill. But I guess to put it a different way. So if you asked me like Deacon, he never in this dialogue mentions a positive philosophical rhetoric. He just doesn't do it. So where, where are we getting all of this language that. No, no, no, you can't throw all the rhetoric out. There's a good rhetoric, et cetera. I think it's heavily. One of the places I would very much point to is this conversation at 465A where he says that flattery, it's because it's a, it's a positive that is seen in the negative. So he tells you why this type of rhetoric, this flatter, this flattery rhetoric is wrong. And he says, you know, it's a knack, it's experience because it does not know the nature of what are things, it applies, by which it applies them. So the first reason is that it lacks an understanding of the nature of things. Then at 465A, he also says that polis rhetoric cannot state the causes of things either. Now this is what's fascinating because my argument would be here, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but just as I've thought through this, is that the nature of things and the cause of things is not within the ambit of rhetoric to begin with. So I think last week, if I understand correctly, this is one of the points that Athenian stranger made is that, well, what science, what body of knowledge, what art, whatever you want to call it, where, where do we find that? What, what teaches us the nature of things and the causes of things? Who makes these distinctions? Well, that's philosophy that does that. Here is where I think you see the implied that there is a true rhetoric, but it has to be a philosophical rhetoric, just like there's a true poetry, but it has to be a philosophic poetry is that if rhetoric's deficiency here with polus is that it doesn't know the nature of things and it doesn't know the cause of things. I think the. I think what Socrates is trying to teach us there is that it does not have philosophy. And if it had philosophy, but I think, I think the implication though is if it had philosophy, then it would be a properly ordered rhetoric. It would know a rhetoric that knows the nature of things and the causes of things, which, as we've given a hundred examples already, this is the type of rhetoric that we see with Socrates. This is his pedagogical rhetoric that is always trying to get the soul to understand what's true, good and beautiful, and to be beautiful and itself. And so that's. I think this is a really key. I think if we want to understand the Gorgias. I think this is a passage that is really, really important. What is it that teaches us the nature of things and the causes of things? And I'm pretty sure last week, Athenian stranger also kind of hung his hat on this passage as well as one of the things to look for when we read Polis, because I think this is where he teaches us a positive version by showing us a critique.
- [80:05]
B
No, there's a. There's certainly a parallel with that from the Republic when Socrates bans the poets. In the first part of the Republic, in, you know, book. Book three, Book four, he's banning the poets because they don't. They don't always tell the truth. In book 10, he bans the poets because they don't know it to begin with. They're not philosophers. And. But then in the Phaedo, which is, you know, the, the deathbed, his deathbed dialogue, he. When they get, when they arrive at the prison to visit with him before he drinks the hemlock, they find him writing poetry. Socrates is putting Aesop's fables into verse. And, and there's at least the assumption has to be, to carry that connection over from the Republic, that you have to assume either a. That Socrates believed he was a philosopher enough to be able to write poetry, he had the philosophical grounding to be able to write poetry, or that Aesop did and so that Aesop could be put into verse because Aesop had a philosophical understanding of reality. And in the Ion, the Eon, whatever text, the same. He has the same problem there that Eon doesn't know and the poets don't know. If they, if they say anything, that's because they're not philosophical. If they say anything, that's true, it's because the gods just directly inspired them with it. So, so the. There's a. I think there's at least a parallel for what the argument he makes against poetry and what would save poetry is very similar to the arguments that would. That he is making against rhetoric. And therefore, I think what could save rhetoric.
- [82:07]
A
I agree. And he makes that same argument in the apology that the poets actually do get some things right, but they don't Know why?
- [82:13]
B
Right, right, right.
- [82:14]
A
And so, and I think, I think you have a good read of him doing that poetic work towards the end of his life. Because sometimes that's, I think, misread as like, well, I better become a poet. Being a philosopher didn't work out, right? Here's my last ditch effort to maybe try and get this correct. So I take back everything I said about poetry and here I go. But no, I think there's again, it's a poetry, to borrow a Christian term that has been baptized in philosophy. I think here what we're seeing is a rhetoric that needs to be baptized into philosophy as well. And I think this is a key section. So let's look at, though kind of pushing on. He gets this conversation on power, which I think is really, really fascinating. This starts at 466B. And again, he just, I think he loves. I read this as him taking great joy in his conversation with Polus because he has these rhetorical flourishings that he just knows he's keeping Polus on his toes. And that's probably more of a negative way. I liked what you said where his rhetoric seems to be an invitation for polis to ascend in his knowledge. And so he likes doing this by presenting these kind of juxtapositions that seem terribly unbelievable to Polus. And this is one of them where he's like, do the tyrants have the greatest power in the polis? And Socrates like, no, not at all. They don't have any power at all.
- [83:38]
B
Right.
- [83:39]
A
Paul is like, you can't. Why can you say this? You can't say that like, what are you doing? And so again, because again, he's linking, I think, this type of rhetorician too, the rhetoricians and the tyrants, both of these have the least power. And this is not only undercutting the ultimate purpose of this rhetoric, which is to become tyrannical, the satiation of my lower appetites, but also showing us immediately that the path you're on right now. So even if you, even if you became what you wanted to become, you don't have true power. It's a really, I think, beautiful statement. You see a little further, he does start to flesh this out a little bit. That power must be good and beneficial for the one who has it. That's a presupposition. Because one of the things too about Socrates is that when he has these kind of back and forth, he typically is looking for the grammar of things, right? He's looking for a definition. And what's here interesting is that he's providing a word and it's kind of reverse engineering from what we typically see him do. He typically is talking to an interlocutor and they have a common understanding of the word. And he's trying to. He's kind of showing them. That's not really correct. Let's ask questions and refine this here. He has some refined definitions in his head and they don't make sense to his interlocutor. So he gives the word, and now we're having to backtrack into a definition.
- [85:05]
B
That's good. That's good point.
- [85:06]
A
Does that make sense?
- [85:06]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [85:07]
A
That's how I read that. Because this is. This is why the dialogue with Pullis is so funny, is because he throws these things out and polis, like, there's no way that's true. And then he starts to unpack the definition. I think one of these right here at the beginning is that power has to be good or beneficial. Like power is not a neutral. It has to be to the benefit of the person that exercises it.
- [85:28]
B
Yes. And the difficulty that they have is that they don't know what's beneficial. So then what they say, you want power and you want to get it through your passions, right. Through your spiritedness. But actually power is going to come by cultivating the intellect, by cultivating wisdom, so that you actually know what the good is, and then therefore can pursue it. Right. That, just that kind of pulling up again, helping him to ascend from. From the. The being governed by the spirited part of his soul to the intellectual part of his soul is. Is. Is happening there. This is also the part where Olas responds that even a child could refute this argument, isn't it? Or does that come a little bit later? But that was kind of a funny part.
- [86:22]
A
Socrates response to that is always funny too, right? Because he's like, oh, well, I would be grateful to that child.
- [86:27]
B
Right, Right.
- [86:30]
A
I think he. Here, he. I mean, he pivots. He pivots into another kind of statement that polis struggles to understand, which is that the tyrants do not do what they want. They don't do what they want. And polis can't understand this. And this is really interesting because again, going back to my initial kind of scholastic training in St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the big things about scholasticism is going to be understanding the distinction between intermediate goods and a final good. I think my pastor recently said, he gave a homily. He said that we make 33,000 decisions each day. And you think about it. Just like getting up and all the things, a lot of them are routine, but you're always doing, like, you're doing them for the sake of something else, right? I don't get, like, getting dressed is not my final end. Like, I get dressed, you know, for like, another purpose and another one. And why do I go to work? Well, I don't go to work actually for the sake of going to work. That's not my final purpose in life. Going to work also is an intermediate good. So I think it was really interesting from someone who comes from, at least originally, a scholastic mindset. Typically we always go straight to Aristotle, like, oh, this is versatile, et cetera. Here you see it clear as day, right? He. I think he actually, even at least in this translation, he actually uses the phrase intermediate goods. That we. We choose certain goods for the sake of other goods. And eventually he does not use this language, but eventually this leads us to a final good or a final end that we see. And this is something that I think Catholicism picks up on. I'm sure Orthodoxy does as well, right? That we all have a final end and we're all acting towards something. And then he'll brilliantly, as you mentioned earlier, he's brilliantly going to tie this into happiness. Because where we find our happiness is really what tailors that final good and what we're making all of our decisions for. But here I think he's really trying to show Polus that no, there are intermediate goods, that people pursue some goods for the sake of others, and we do things for the sake of what is good. Right. He kind of just leaves that there. He doesn't. I mean, obviously, like the reading Plato, I'm like, oh, please talk about that more.
- [88:32]
B
Right?
- [88:32]
A
Like, I want you to say more about that. But that's not where polis is. Polis. That goes to a previous conversation too, right? Like, Polis isn't ready for a conversation about the good. He just needs to understand how is it that people make decisions. Because we're trying to unpack the fact that the tyrants aren't actually doing what they want. Or at least he doesn't use this phrase, I don't think. But again, on this classic side, we would talk about apparent goods, right? The will always. Well, again, he doesn't have a will, right? So this is. We're drifting off into. Into Christianity. But we always choose what we think is good. And. But sometimes they're apparent goods. They're not actually truly good for us. Right. I think you see something here with the tyrant as well is that Plato is pointing out through Socrates, the tyrants don't actually choose what it is that they want. Right. They, because he's got show, they want happiness. But the, the way they've chosen to go about achieving happiness is actually not going to work. So they're, they're not actually choosing what they want.
- [89:36]
B
Yeah. Yes, the will part of it again, but I don't, I don't know if that's, I mean, go. I mean the wrong, the wrong. Well, I, I don't know that I ever. It ever occurred to me that Socrates doesn't have a concept of the will. So when you said that I was. Took me aback. I don't know, I, I'm polis and I don't understand what you just said. Please explain, help me. Well, I understand.
- [89:59]
A
Yeah. That also assumes that I have knowledge behind what I've said. No, I think it's just like broadly speaking, because I'm a student here as well. But if you notice in the Platonic dialogues, he doesn't really ever talk about the will, even when he, when he does the stress. So like a classic juxtaposition here is the kind of Aristotelian anthropology and the Platonic anthropology. So the Platonic is that the intellect and then the spirited and the appetitive. But where Aristotle goes particularly as adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas, is that you have an intellect, a will, and then you have your passions, and your passions have things that correspond to being spirited and impetitive. There's two parts to the passions. And so that's really. The Platonic goes. But he adds this like will. And then particularly I think you probably don't get in a lot of ways a really thick understanding of the will as we see it today in Christianity really probably until Augustine, like Augustine really focuses on the will. Here in Plato you just don't get really. It's, I think an antecedent to it. And I'm not even sure. I still struggle with this too. About what is the concept of the will? Does that actually add or take away, does it overly complicate it? That's something I'm still kind of wrestling with because I really want to revisit St. Augustine after spending this much time in the Platonic corpus. Because then you can start to see where you can start to see the differences. Because like, wait, I never heard about that when I read Plato. Like this is something that's, that's been picked up. But yeah, I think it's. You just don't See, a conversation about the will as a faculty of the soul. Really, in Plato, he really, I think an antecedent to this is erotics, right? He talks about love, and so he talks about that. I mean, I guess, to put it in a pedagogical sense that's more systematized is. I think he really does kind of paint that there's not only this eros that animates the soul broadly, but that each part of the soul loves something. I think you see this in the Symposium, right? So the intellect has an erotic longing to satiate in the beauty of truth. The spirited part has this erotic longing to satiate in nobility, this kind of human excellence, and then the appetitive and the beauty of pleasure. And even in the Symposium, you get that each one has a fecundity to it, right? Eros is never sterile. And so, you know, the intellect, I think, brings wisdom. The spirited, like we already mentioned, it's. It's brings a certain victory, which brings honor and glory. And then the appetitive. It's interesting even in the pagan text, right? The appetitive brings children. That's the zenith of its deal. And even with. And then there's another. Another layer, if you will, is that each. Each one of these fruits, right, the fecundity of Eros in each part of the soul brings a certain type of immortality. And so, you know, you see, obviously, you see that this is the entire. Well, not entire, but this is. This is the entire picture of the Iliad, right? This is for Achilles. Do I go home and have a certain good, kind of more of an appetitive good of just like a family life and et cetera. And so Plato will say there's ritually Diotima, right, in the Symposium, but that there's an immortality in children that we live on through our children, right? Which I think is. There's a certain beauty, too. And for a pagan text to pick that up, I think is great. But then you have an immortality in the spirited part of, well, you know, my name will never die, which is what Achilles end up choosing. And that seems to be working out for him, you know, thus far, even though we have, you know, we're still talking about him. So it works, even though we. We do have the conversation in the Odyssey where he would rather be a dirt farmer back on Earth. And that's. That's a difficult text to wrestle with. And then it doesn't. The immortality of the intellect's not entirely clear, I think, in the Symposium, but there is something about Satiating in the forms. I think that brings a type of immortality. He doesn't really mention it explicitly. Maybe it's esoterically in there, but it isn't. It's not as explicit. But then eventually, right, because this is the ladder of love. We go all the way up to beauty itself, which in the Symposium is still an idea, it's a form. But then in Christianity, like with St. Augustine, it's God, you know, you see this in two. And you see this in Gregory of Nyssa. Right. Gregory of Nyssa is great. Right. So the, like life of Moses, you know, Moses climbing Mount Sinai is an erotic act until he satiates in the bright darkness of God.
- [94:12]
B
Right.
- [94:12]
A
It's just a beautiful, beautiful text. But, yeah, you don't. You really. I mean, to a certain degree. Again, I'm not a scholar on this. So you have all of this Platonic spirituality that seems to present, I would say, a really beautiful, also simple understanding of your soul, its loves, because then you can map on the virtues, like how the virtues perfect each part, right. Prudence to intellectual courage, the spirited, and temperance to the appetitive. And then justice beautifies the whole thing by making sure things are well ordered together, which is why justice seems to be the virtue par excellence in Plato over and over again. And then even someone like Saint Maximus the Confessor will then line up things like prayer, almsgiving, and fasting to the soul as well.
- [94:53]
B
Right.
- [94:54]
A
So last Lent, I gave the talk in Ocia for how. What to do during Lent. And I used this Platonic understanding of the soul, the virtues and the spiritual disciplines to say, here's a map, like, where are you lacking? Like you could do these things. So. But the point is, like, you can look at the whole map and there's no will, Right?
- [95:14]
B
Right, Right.
- [95:15]
A
And so it's a. It's a fact. It's something like. I want to be really clear here. This is a nascent idea of my own formation. I'd like to really look at it. But it. It dawned on me that I was reading the will back into Plato. And so right now I would say I've tried to exercise it from my understanding of anthropology and say, no, no, no. Where. How does. How does Plato talk about these longings? And it really seems to be rooted in erotics and the love that moves us, that then we have to discipline each part of the soul into this. And so it's a. It's still fascinating. I'm still kind of growing it in myself. But I think a lot of the, our understanding of the will comes heavily from, from St. Augustine. I mean it's in Aristotle. But the way that we talk about it I think is very much Augustinian. And then St. Thomas tries to take that Aristotelian tradition and the Augustinian one and kind of merge them together. And what I think today, if you tried to talk about anthropology that doesn't include the will. It's an incredibly foreign or alien concept to us.
- [96:12]
B
Right.
- [96:12]
A
We're completely downstream from this.
- [96:14]
B
Yeah. I mean we have heresies around it first councils around it. Interesting. I must, I probably was doing the same thing then reading, reading a Christian conception of the will as a faculty that could be mapped. I was probably doing that, reading it into Plato because I mean, as I, as I'm thinking about it, the only thing I actually see in Plato is that there that we do make choices and, and that sometimes the will or the. Sorry, the soul has. The person has to choose between something that his intellect wants and something that his thumos or the spirited part wants and the appetitive part wants. And. But there's no, I don't, I can't think of any place where he ever tells us what is making the choice. Just that one is made. I have to reread. I know that I remember that being in the. The Republic. There's a discussion of that there. So I'm going to go back and look at that section again. It's great.
- [97:29]
A
Yeah. What. Maybe one area that caught my attention that you kind of back up into it is his understanding of how the virtues perfect the soul. And so as I said, when you read the Republic, and again, I know there's lots of blood on the floor conversations about this because I want to make distinctions between people, get into arguments about what did Plato believe, what does Plato teach in the dialogue then what's he teaching his whole corpus overall? Because sometimes that's not terribly systematic or at least not on its face. Then there's an argument of what does Plato actually believe in his text. And so I've had to admit to myself overall that I am coming from a Christian lens. And part of that Christian lens is, is that I believe a lot of Platonic things that I'm not sure Plato did, if that makes sense.
- [98:15]
B
Right.
- [98:16]
A
Like I, like I would really hold to like the tripart understanding of the soul, how it maps on the virtue. Like the early church fathers pick this up, you know, very heavily. Does Plato hold to this as a hard fast rule? I think is a different conversation, if that makes sense. Right. And so one of the ways I think you can look at this with the issue of the will, that maybe it might be a good starting point, because it's somewhere where I can make comparisons, is the conversation of virtue, because as I mentioned earlier, so prudence perfects the intellect. Then you have courage perfecting the spirited part, and then you have temperance perfecting the appetitive. And then justice and the Platonic sense is the perfection of the soul overall, because justice deals with what's well ordered and proper due to two things. And so the soul being properly ordered is just. And so it adorns the soul. I think it's a language he uses in the Republic. It adorns the soul with a certain beauty. Well, compare that to Aristotle, and maybe I'll make a caveat here, that a lot of my Aristotle is known through St. Thomas Aquinas. But even if you parf out his soul and virtues, it's different. So prudence perfects the intellect. Great. But then it's justice that perfects the will. And then you get into fortitude or courage. Temperance perfects then the two parts of the passions, which are very much analogues for the Platonic side on the thumotic and the appetitive. Because one of the distinctions there with justice is that Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas don't believe justice is an interesting virtue for them because it requires another. So you can't be just to yourself. So the justice that Plato talks about, that you have to have a just soul, is only justice by analogy. It's not actually a true form of justice, if that makes sense. It's only justice by analogy. Because even though there's two different parts, like, you know, your parts of your soul have to be in proper order and proper hierarchy and et cetera, it's not justice per se. It's actually only an analogy that justice always requires. So this is why we get the definition of justice and modern Christianity, that it's giving the other their due, because justice requires another for Aristotle and St. Thomas. And so I think the question on virtue raises it very clearly, is what does justice do? And for because justice requires another for them, then it perfects the will, whereas with Plato, it's not perfect. There is no will to be perfected. It's perfecting the soul as a whole. So there's two different. If I was going to try and dig into this more, I think the question of virtue is a good starting place because it's rooted in their anthropology, if that makes sense.
- [100:57]
B
Yeah, okay, that's that's good. I've always been, I've always been frustrated by kind of the Christian understanding of justice. Because, because I, because I, I, it, it frustrates me that it's only external or primarily external. Right. And there's no way for me to be just, just within. And I've always, I've always. Well, since encountering the idea, I guess I've always accepted that that Socrates view is. It's a better view in my mind that, that there's a way for me to be just internally within. But then that manifests itself in the way I, the way I choose to interact with other people, I guess, whereas, so you see it, you know, in my interactions with other people. But that's not where it is. I always took it as, like, as, you know, how when we're talking about the Greeks, but you're really describing something Plato believed or what we think Plato believed, and then we just apply that to the Greeks, but really it's just like, you know, two people, that one of them was put to death for it by the rest of the Greeks. So I always thought of the Greeks as, as thinking that virtue or the good of the city comes from the good of the individual. Starting with the good of the individual and then that extending out to the city and then thinking of the Romans as if we create a. Just an orderly city or empire, you know, place, then that will lead to the people living in it being just an orderly and so like it's outside, outward movement moves from the outside to the inside for the Romans versus the inside to the outside for the Greeks, which of course is probably a horrible oversimplification of how two entire civilizations thought about reality. But it was always, it was, it was the intellectual or the pedagogical foothold that you described your it earlier. Right. It was a pedagogical foothold for me. So I liked it. So. Yeah, just kidding. Yeah.
- [103:17]
A
I find myself using that phrase more as I'm trying to grasp with the text, like it sounds better than I'm wildly guessing over here trying to figure out what's going on. Right.
- [103:25]
B
Yeah.
- [103:25]
A
Yeah, no, that's good. Okay, so I did promise you before we started this podcast, that would not be three hours and I'm not sure I'm doing well on that. So we're gonna sally forth into the text. I will say too, you know, to our audience, if you're listening and you happen to be an expert on the will in hellenized cultures and then adapted into Christianity, email me. And we'll Talk because it's, It's. I'm pointing it out as an area that I've. It's kind of that negative, positive knowledge, right? So there's a negative here that I've realized, like, oh, you can't read this into Plato, but like, the positive of, like, okay, so how did this actually flow into Christianity? Like, you know, I know Augustine. Augustine played like a strong role, but like, how he actually, because he seems to have deeply Platonic sides, but then also brings in the will really heavily. And so I think he has his own anthropology, his own understanding of virtue that really comes in to Christianity. These are things that I very much would like to learn more of. And again, I'll recommend to everyone that Plato, Socrates, Augustine, these are the teachers and we are the students. And this is how we come to knowledge, just bit by bit. So kind of rooting ourselves back in the text again, talking about the intermediate goods, the final end, to use that language, you know, Ultimately this gets to the point where another wonderful line is at 469A, that we're supposed to pity the tyrant, which is the exact opposite of what Polus and Gorgias. Well, I guess to a certain degree. And then definitely Callicles is trying to do, right? The tyrant is actually to be pitied because they don't do what they want. And what they do do, right, is actually detrimental to their own soul. It's actually detrimental to their own good. It's interesting here too, in Polis's response, and I saw this several times, where Polus will literally agree to all the premises. Like, he will say, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yes, that makes sense. That makes sense. And then when he finally gets to Socrates and it's like, oh, okay, so therefore, right? So he's showing us the syllogism, right? And so he's like, okay, so therefore this must be true. He's like, no, that's ridiculous. And I think you see this really clearly here. This translation calls it like a testimony or testimonial knowledge, right? Where Polus, when he gets back into a corner, is basically like, no one believes that, right? He appeals to the majority to say, no, no one believes this. Like, it's you against the whole world. And it's interesting because I, I want to read this as like a. Like a pathos, like a, you know, like a passion, like an appeal. Appeal to people's emotions. Because the more people you get into a group, it tends to be. It's the emotions that tend to control, right? No, no one thinks of the mob as a great way to go about good discussions and, you know, philosophical reasoning. The mob gave us Barabbas over Jesus. So here I think you see this like, contrast between this kind of testimonial, almost like pathos, argument of emotion versus really a logos, that there's this logical argument that Socrates is trying to give to lead the soul. And it's interesting because if we take, we take kind of like Socrates as a good faith actor here, that he really is trying to get Polus to see what is true. I think there seems to be a strong educational bent here that I think we've already alluded to several times of, like, well, what can the teacher actually teach the student? Like, how much can you move a student to the truth? And then they're just simply recalcitrant to it. I mean, I don't, you know, so let's just take as an example that I think Socrates's rhetoric here is very good. I think his argument is very good. I think he set up a true syllogism based off the grammar that he has. He's tried to explain the grammar. I think Polus has all the tools to accept the conclusion and he doesn't. And it seems to me that that for him is, is just simply because he's not ready to believe. Right. He's not ready to receive it despite the evidence.
- [107:24]
B
Yeah. So do you, do you see that as being the case because he isn't ready himself, like he doesn't want to accept the fact that the tyrant is actually to be pitied or, and whatever the, you know, the following, the arguments that follow that or the conclusions that follow that? Or is there a part of a part of Polus that's still, that's still like there's an audience. It's not, it's not like it's just Socrates and polis by themselves. Right. Gorgias is there, Alicles is there. The like, like he's in front of his teacher and he's beside a fellow student. Right. Calicles is also a student of Gorgias. Right. And so, and so he, he has to, he has to defend his, his teacher. He has to defend the, the art of his teacher. He has to look good in front of his teacher. He has to look good. He has to look better than the, than his classmate for his teacher. Like, because is it the circumstances of his life, not just his, not just his, his understanding of the idea, but the circumstance of his, of his life that's, that's restricting his ability to, to, to Follow the argument or. Or to go along with the argument until. Until it doesn't. Right. Because by the end then it does seem to come around to me, at least in my reading of. At least. So.
- [109:06]
A
Yeah.
- [109:06]
B
How much do you think that might be happening?
- [109:09]
A
I think that. Well, I mean, they're, I guess like one way to approach that is. Yeah, he's not a disembodied intellect, so he. He's having these other things pulling on him as Socrates is trying to do this. So even if the intellect. Because I guess one question would be what is the ordering of Polus's soul?
- [109:28]
B
Yeah.
- [109:29]
A
So because the problem is, is that the soul has to exist in hierarchy. Right. We say it's perfected by justice. It has to be in property proportion. But not only does, say, the intellect have to love truth and with rectitude in a proper proportion, but also the intellect has to govern the spirited and the appetitive. So you can also have your soul out of order. And I think that's one thing maybe to map onto what you said with Polus is that if he is an analog to the spirited, the courage there is going to be this recalcitrance not to accept who has been deemed as your enemy. Right. This is a war. And so I think you see Polis like his intellect's being pulled. But I'm not sure that Polis's intellect governs the soul. I think that it might be his spirited part. And the spirited part likes, you know, fame and glory and honor. And I think that goes into your comments about setting. Like, I mean, are you more likely to admit that you're wrong with your friend at the coffee shop or when you publicly debate online or in a classroom? You're probably more, you know, inclined to admit you were wrong when it's one on one, not when you're debating in front of a group. Because our pride, I mean, I guess to use a more Christian term, right, your pride kicks in. But here in a more hellenized term, your spiritedness, your thematic is not going to give this up. Right. I need that victory. And so, no, I think that's a good thing to remember. I'm glad you said that. There is a crowd. This is a different type of dialogue. This is not Euthyphro and Socrates off by himself. This is not Aedes and Socrates off by themselves. Like outside of the apology, where there's 500 people there, there's actually a good amount of people in this dialogue. And I think that. No, I think you're absolutely Correct. To point that out because I think it heavily affects Socrates's interlocutor's capacity to accept the truth. And I mean, there's a deep educational lesson in that as well about the soul's capacity to receive truth and things that can impede it.
- [111:27]
B
Yeah. If we, if we were, you know, the Searcy Institute where I work, the. We have conferences, you know, two or three, four a year. And if we were at a Searcy conference right now, having this conversation on stage in front of the audience, and you told me that the Greeks didn't have a concept of the will, I would have fought with you. But now it's just the two of us. And so I'm like, oh, tell me more. Right. That's because I forgot this is being recorded and it's going to be in the whole world. Right. I'm playing a little bit, but I think it's illustrated the point, right. That polis is like, it's what I love about Plato's dialogues generally is that sometimes people think that he's creating strawman interlocutors who just, who just answer Socrates questions the way they want. He wants them to, and they, and. And then they accuse him of it all the time. Like people say, like, oh, yeah, you can get trapped into some corner that you don't even agree with, but Socrates is going to drag you there and make you believe that. But the reality is like, first, they almost never end with somebody coming to Socrates point of view. Very, very rarely, in fact, almost just as rarely do they even end with the, with a, with a stated answer to the original question. But they're always, they're always about a real person who really has, who really has feelings or emotions or, or passions or desires that are affecting the way he is. And this, this might be a good exam, a good example of that, that Paulus is there in front of his teacher trying to. And as a spirited person, he wants honor. Right. We talked about that earlier, about. That's why he wants to give speeches, because speeches get applause. But also representing his teacher. Well, standing up against Socrates in this war, as you said, is something that would lead to his teacher honoring him after the fact. Right. So that could be slowing down his, his ability to follow the arguments to its conclusions.
- [113:47]
A
Yeah, there's something that, I guess to put it in Christian terms, right. Like the, the seed is sown, but then there's some, some deficiency in the heart in which the truth cannot actually take root. Right. And find that type of fecundity that we want it to find and I think shows us that time and time again. Yeah. Just to kind of push us along into probably one of the most fascinating claims that I think Socrates makes in this. Right. So he. This is around like 472e. Socrates says the man who acts unjustly is unhappy, and even more so if he goes unpunished for his actions. Right. Or doing what is unjust is worse than suffering an injustice. Right. He makes these two big claims here. Polus cannot handle this. But I think Polus, like, maybe to give a defense of polis here. I think Polus, though, gives a really good pushback that I think if I try to teach this in any typical class, he's like, wait, hold on. Right. So he picks up on this, that doing what is unjust is worse than suffering an injustice.
- [115:01]
B
Right.
- [115:01]
A
It's a huge claim. So polis is like, you've got to be kidding me. So you're telling me that if I'm a guy and I get, you know, imprisoned, falsely imprisoned, tortured, all my property, you know, family murdered, all this stuff, that is still better than if I committed an act of injustice against someone else? Because obviously what's happening here, right. Is that Socrates is critiquing, again, the goal of being a tyrant, and so therefore, the tyrant would be some of the worst of all people, and it would be better to suffer injustice than to commit it. But I think that polis has. I mean, again, it's not a logical argument. I think it's. It's an argument. This translation says testimonial. Right. It's an argument. It's appeal to the passions. It's an appeal to emotion. But that's what I would get. That's what. I think. This is a really naturally human response to this of like, no, there can't. There can't be. It cannot be better to suffer an injustice. I mean, look at all these terrible things that can happen to you. Wouldn't it be better to commit an injustice against someone else?
- [116:02]
B
Yeah. The. The. If rhetoric is what Socrates is accusing it of, accusing it of being at this point in the dialogue, then rhetoric is a. Is a. At least as Gorgias teaches it, rhetoric is a. Is a. It's a spirited way of thinking, of communicating. It gives. It gives pleasure and gratification to the soul, to the chat, to the thumos, to the spiritual part. And. And so then somebody who's trained in thinking rhetorically as Polus is, is somebody who's going to be habituated to think with spirited Type of arguments. I mean, mine says that I think my, my, my thing says that he's answering with rhetoric instead of, instead of with argument. And, and so he's using. And in mind, in that particular example that he gives about the guy being tortured. Da da da 473B. Socrates accuses him of using a scare tactic at that point. Right. That you're not trying to help me see the truth, and you're not even trying to see the truth yourself. You're simply making an appeal to fear. And. Which is a, which is a rhetorical way of thinking. And, and, and in this case, at least a spirited way of thinking or of arguing of. Yeah, persuading the. But that's the very thing Sardis is trying to get Polis to go beyond. Which, Which I don't, I don't think in and of itself is bad except when it's completely devoid or divorced from philosophy, from the intellect. Right. And in this case it is, it's still, it's still being divorced from that. It's not grounded in that. And so Socrates has to get him to think, to think about it in this, in a different way, dialectically or whatever. So.
- [118:23]
A
Yeah, because I think one of the things about this type of rhetoric of Gorgias or Polus, and you saw this even in, you know, Gorgias's famous defense of Helen, is that he's not even consistent in the defense. That's not the point. Right. The point is not that these things, that rhetoric is logical, but rather that it feeds the soul. These things that sound good. It reminds me of Mino. Right? Mino in the dialogue. Meno likes definitions that sound fancy. That's what he likes. It's not about the truth of the definition or if we find the most succinct way or terse way of actually describing something. It's like, ooh, I can memorize that definition. And it sounds like I am intelligent.
- [119:00]
B
Right.
- [119:00]
A
It's like purple prose. And so, no, I think that Polis, because, see, Polis, like, can consent because. How do I phrase this? Polis is not consistent. But not just the fact that he denies these conclusions, but even he'll deny, like Socrates will throw out a thesis and Polus will say, no, that's ridiculous. No one believes that. But then like, Polis has to understand that he's being led because like some of the parts that when pull us, like, sometimes Polis agrees. And I also find that to be difficult to believe based off what he just rejected literally 20 seconds ago.
- [119:36]
B
Right, right.
- [119:36]
A
So like, he'll say, like, you know, we say, you know, this is 474C. Like, which is, which is worse? To commit an injustice or to suffer an injustice? And Polis agrees with that premise, right? That it's worse, right? Doing what is unjust is more bad than suffering and injustice. And he agrees with that premise. Well, you. If you agree with the premise, why did you argue against him 20 seconds ago? So this is where you get into, like, what's happening here. So sometimes it, I mean, I guess a very positive charitable read of Polis would be that Socrates has the capacity to pull him in and get him to actually have a true dialectic that's focused on the intellectual. But Polis is then hearing, every once in a while he'll hear something that his soul then just kicks out against. And he says, no, no, no, that's ridiculous. Not understanding, like, well, brother, you just agreed to all of these things. Because he also says, you know, so then Socrates is pushing this on, right? Which is worse, a wrongdoer paying what is due or a wrongdoer not paying what is due? Okay, well, then pulls clearly is like, okay, well, that's a clear one. Like, not paying what's due is wrong. And so then this gets into this kind of interesting discussion of corruption, right? Is there a corruption of the soul? And he's like, yeah, it's injustice, ignorance, cowardice, etc. He doesn't use this word, but like, obviously I wrote out vice, right? So he'll talk about in the Republic that virtue is a type of beauty of the soul and vice is a type of ugliness. And you can say health or sickness, right? There's several analogies that you could play out here. But that's what he's doing here, right? So the corruption of the soul, the injustice is the worst, right? Injustice there being this kind of capturing of all the vices. And that makes sense from what we've talked about, because for Plato, because justice is rooted in the soul. It's the adornment of the soul, of proper ordering and proportionality in the soul. If you suffer injustice, everything else is out of whack in the soul, right? It's not just a problem with your will. The whole soul is disordered in a certain way. So if you can get your soul just, it makes everything beautiful on your interior life. And so he also makes a really interesting distinction about how is it the worst of the corruptions, that it's not by pain but by moral badness. There are things that you'll Suffer more pain, but it's a moral badness that is wrong. And so at 477E he gives like a list of the corruption versus the remedy. And so he says that poverty. So there are four. There are three corruptions, right? Poverty, disease and injustice. He also says indiscipline and then the remedies in the same order is financial management for poverty. Which sounds funny because the Christian years, we always think almsgiving, like we always think of something that we give to someone, like charity. But this is a natural argument. It's like, no, you need to be better with your money and be more prudent, right? That's how you get out of poverty. Medicine obviously helps the corruption of disease, and then justice helps the corruption, the remediate in the soul. And you know, he says, is it not true then that the most admirable of these is justice? The worst of these is injustice in the soul. Right? So he has this like, beautiful little mapping here. And again, like, Polus is just like agreeing as we go along, even though Socrates has already thrown out his thesis, like on this one. It's not like we're being led to an answer, if that makes sense. Like Socrates already threw out his thesis all the way back up around 472e about injustice makes us unhappy. And it's actually worse if you go unpunished for this.
- [123:14]
B
Yeah, I actually was surprised at how. I thought it was pretty impressive how Polis picked up that last argument there about injustice being the worst of the three corruptions. But I, I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense because being. Being spirited, he's more interested in things like honor and nobility and glory and stuff anyways. But in the comparison, we're talking about, you know, poverty, physical disease, and then a soulish disease of injustice in discipline. So maybe it makes sense, but, but as slow as he was for the argument getting up to that point, then to like, see pretty quickly, like, yeah, that's, that's right, that's the worst. And then therefore the, the, the remedy of justice would be the most admirable because it's fixing the worst problem, right? It's the most admirable remedy because it's fixing the worst problem. That seems to make sense, right?
- [124:16]
A
Because even, I guess another kind of scholastic maxim when you read St. Thomas that you pick up always is that the corruption of the best is the worst. Right? So the higher, the higher the angel, the greater the demon. You see that in Lucifer. I don't think, like many things, Plato's never That clear. But you see that underpinning in this, right? So the corruption of the best is the worst, right? And so with justice and injustice in the soul. But what did you think about this? Because I think you mentioned earlier about, when you reread this kind of, you know, what is the purpose of the dialogue is here is where he really goes into happiness, right? So he says there's two types of happiness. This is down at like 478C. He says that the happiest man. I guess that's in 478D. He introduces the concepts, but then he. He gives like a little conclusion. The nice thing about his longer dialogues is that he once in a while actually gives like a summary of what he's talked about thus far, which is. Which is really helpful, actually. So here he gives a summary of, like, okay, so there's two types of happiness. The happiest man is the one who does not have the corruption at all. So he has no injustice, right? Injustice, Right. He has none of that. The second happiest man is the one who rids himself of the corruption. And so you've become corrupt, but you're happy because you've gotten rid of it. But you're only secondarily happy because the one who's happier than you is the one who never fell into corruption to begin with.
- [125:46]
B
Yeah, yeah. The. That, that, that. It was that section there which helped, which made me see it more this time, that because even justice is subordinate to this in his. Justice as a remedy, rather is subordinate to this. It. I mean, subordinate in that it's. It's to get you this, right? To get you to be that second kind of happiest person. And then I, that. I don't think it stood out to me in previous readings. So I just saw it kind of as a. As a dialogue. I always thought the first half of the dialogue, which is not really the first half, the first third of the dialogue is about rhetoric, and then the second two thirds are about justice. But. But all of that is. Is for this point here, it seems like. So the argument for happiness seems to be more central to the argument, to the dialogue than I realized. I don't. I, you know, I'm just reading a English translation, but my understanding is that he's using eudaimonia there, the same word that Aristotle is going to use for happiness, you know, later. So which is which, I hadn't been aware of that either, that eudaimonia was a Platonic term rather than an Aristotelian term. I mean, originally.
- [127:06]
A
Yeah, that'd be fascinating. I think happiness takes on maybe as we kind of approach the end of this section on Polis. I think that if we start looking at what should we expect in Callicles, even though he's been referenced 400 times already as some guideposts when you read that section. But I do think happiness plays a larger role in the conversation about Callicles. But Callicles drops this veneer and just says, yes, I want to be a tyrant. I want to satiate my appetites. Because then it's really with Callicles that rhetoric completely disappears. Well, I shouldn't say completely disappears. It very clearly plays a secondary role because the whole question becomes, what is the purpose of rhetoric? And so now we have to compare this. Callicles satiation of my lower desires is what makes me happy with a different type of happiness that Plato's presenting. And so I think that happiness plays. It's being introduced here, and I think in the Callicles dialogue, it plays a more central role because it reminds me, the dialogue with Callicles, like we already compared him a little bit to Thrasymachus at the beginning of the Republic, but it also really reminds me of the end of the Republic, of the conversation between Glaucon and Socrates, right. That there's really two paths, right. To satiate your erotic desires.
- [128:19]
B
Right?
- [128:19]
A
You could become the tyrant, but these are baser appetites, and they really live the life of a cow. That's what's happening. Right? And they can't. And we'll see this with Callicles. They also can't ever be satiated. And if you. If happiness finds a certain rest, then needing to constantly be satiated is not a good way to approach happiness. So I think that happiness plays a really strong. A really strong point here because it allows us to step past rhetoric per se, and just say again, it's that intermediate good. So you can make the argument that rhetoric is an intermediate good that's only used for a greater good. And so Callicles argument is very much about, what is that greater good? Is it satiated lower appetites, or is it a different type of happiness?
- [129:03]
B
So I will. I don't get to be part of the next conversation, but it's in thinking about the Calicles conversation, you're going to get to have the. What's interesting to me is that when he's talking to Polis and he says that, you know, suffering is to suffer, especially if I've committed injustice, suffering is good. But if I have to choose between committing an injustice and Suffering an injustice, even undeservedly, it's better to serve. It's better to suffer the undeserved injustice. But he says at the beginning, when that whole section. When that whole section comes up, where he starts getting into this conversation about the. About suffering injustice, he says, I would rather avoid suffering injustice undeservedly, but I would rather suffer it than do an injustice. And then when he's talking to Callicles, he actually walks that back and says that he thinks we ought to willingly suffer injustice, even undeservedly. And. And there's something striking about that. And it would be. It would be. It would be. It would be very fascinating conversation as you're thinking of as you get a chance to make this choice, to exercise your will in this way. Sir, why. Why for Polis, is the. Is it. Is the answer good enough to just be, yeah, let's avoid that. But if it happens, this is the circumstances in which it should happen. But for Callicles, it's no, we actually ought to. We ought to actually embrace, not even try to run from undeserved injustice. So I think Polis and Callicles are that different people, right? It's like, yes, they both want to be tyrants, and yes, they're both students of Gorgias, and yes, they both want to be tyrants. But what they want out of that tyranny, I think, is very different. I mean, again, as we've been pointing out, the passion, the spirited person versus the appetitive person, right? There's something more repetitive about Talakles desire for tyranny than Polus's. But then that somehow the taming of that, maybe. I don't know, taming of that might require more physical suffering. I don't know.
- [131:41]
A
I think. Yeah, that's an interesting observation. I think the one thing on a broad spectrum that we have to look at next week is so much of this conversation has been that rhetoric tailors itself to the soul in front of it, even a proper. What I would argue a proper rhetoric, a Socratic rhetoric, a philosophical rhetoric. And so we should expect that if there's a new interlocutor, hopefully the philosophical principles remain the same, but the rhetoric's going to shift because I do. I do think that Socrates had a different rhetoric with Gorgias as he did with Polus. And so now we have Callicles, who tries to come over the top, but Socrates appreciates his honesty. So then the question is, okay, well, then how will the Socratic soul use rhetoric to try and teach truth to the soul of Callicles. And I think we can have similar conversations that we did with Gorgias and Polus, which is, do we find the soul of Callicles at all malleable and open to instruction, or is it just completely shut off? And if it is shut off, why do we have this? The longest part of the whole dialogue is with Callicles. So, like, to whose benefit is it to the men listening, the young men of Athens, right, that are listening? Is it to Gorgias? Is it a little bit to both? Is Polis still listening? Like, what. Who is it that the pratic soul, right, is trying to still instruct? So that would be one thing that I think is, as listeners kind of go through the third part of the dialogue here. I think that's one thing to keep in mind. But he ends here. It's interesting that right here at the end with Polis as he tries to circle back and return to the conversation of what is the purpose of rhetoric? And, you know, so he says. He has. He has beautiful lines here, right? He says the unjust man should go to the judge as the sick goes to a doctor. So not only should we not want to be a tyrant, but if we've done something unjust, we should want to go to the judge, because us being punished is a good. And it's like medicine for the soul, right? So the unjust man receiving justice through, you know, a court, punishment, discipline, whatever, is like a sick body receiving medicine. It's a good that we should willingly, you know, receive. And Polus then goes back to, you know, he finds this absurd. I get. I do get frustrated with Polis because even though I always try and read these interlocutors, you know, in kind of a charitable manner, Polis just constantly agreeing with these things throughout the whole thing and then just being recalcitrant about the conclusions is very frustrating. And I think that probably does have, like we mentioned, probably strong educational themes. And it was a weird ending. Maybe not weird, but, like, it caught my attention that he ends with this section of, well, you know, by the way, if you are an enemy of a man, you would want him to become a tyrant. Like, so if you. If you. You're. If you're an enemy of a man and, you know he's stolen money, you don't want him to get caught. You don't want him to be punished, because these things are good for his soul. So actually he flips the whole thing on its head that actually I want my enemies to become tyrants. That's who we want to become tyrants is our enemies. Because having a tyrannical soul is a punishment in of itself.
- [135:02]
B
Right? Yeah. Because he prefaces that with if we are in fact supposed to harm our enemies. And this is what that would mean, Right. This means we have to let them. We have to let them go unpunished because that's actually worse for them.
- [135:16]
A
And it was really interesting because I was reading this because I've kind of touched on it several times this year. I was reading this while also going through Dante's Inferno for lint. And so it's really fascinating to see this kind of argument that it is good for the unjust to be punished and it would be worse for them if they were not punished for the benefit of their own soul. And so I think it was an interesting comparison of like how Christianity adopts, I think, certain arguments of this out of justice than what we see here in a pagan context, but a pagan context that truly takes the soul seriously.
- [135:58]
B
Yeah. So then the question that was asked at the beginning, which is that about rhetoric, which was, is the, the telos of Gorgias and Polus's gratitude. Rhetoric is, is pleasure. Gratitude. Right. And then, but then we don't know what the purpose of rhetoric is from Socrates perspective, but now we have that answer, right? The purpose of rhetoric is to bring about the justice that would, that would bring about the healing that's needed for the, for the sick or the corrupted soul. Because he says in that last bit, right before he talks about the enemies, he says that this means we should go into the courts, we should turn ourselves over, and then we should not use rhetoric to prevent ourselves from being punished, but to make sure that we are punished and to bring our family and our friends and our neighbors in to make sure that they are punished. Coincidentally, as I was as, as you were saying that, I thought, oh man, I wouldn't do that if I broke the law. I'm not going to like, just, I mean, I don't. Maybe if I murdered somebody or something. Right. But like, I don't. This is a silly example, of course, but when I speed, I don't go find the police officer and say, hey, I went, I went 70 and a 55 back there. Can you give me a tick? And I was thinking that, you know, how many people that would, how many, how many people like, like me that would read this argument and agree Socrates is right, Polus is. Polis is right to come along or you know, should come along then. But then I don't actually do It. But then I realized, Deacon, I think we do. If we have a tradition that allows for it. We do. That's the sacrament of confession, isn't it? I'm going to turn myself in so that I can be punished or given the medicine, the remedy that I need to restore order to the soul.
- [138:08]
A
No, I think it's a beautiful connection. Yeah. And that. And even receiving the penance. So it's not simply, you know, because that gets pushed on a lot. Like, why. Why can't just go in and say, you know, I'm sorry, and there's mercy. Like, why do I have to do this thing afterwards? It's like, well, this is actually good. We actually see that this actually helps to reorient the soul. Not only. It's actually something that if you are well formed, you would want to receive. Actually would want to receive that punishment. It's not really a punishment, but. Or at least that's not how we contextualize it. Sounds a bit harsh, but I would like to receive that action that is designed to reorient my soul towards the good, even though it might be laborious or difficult to do. Right. So, no, I think that's a beautiful. I think it's a beautiful connection. No, I think his statements here on justice, I think are something we really have to take seriously. And that's why, again, a lot of times on the podcast, our little mantra that I remind people of is that Hebrew faith, coupled together with Greek reason under Roman order, prepared the world for Jesus Christ. This is a providential act. And I think that seeing Socrates and Plato's Socrates kind of paints such a correct understanding of justice. And how this looks in a pagan context without the aid of divine revelation is really. Is really phenomenal. Right. And so here we can, as Christians, read this text and see a lot of truth about justice. And then how this kind of tills the soil for something like Christianity to come on the scene. So, no, I think it's beautiful. I think it's beautiful dialogue. One final thought. I think it's interesting that the comment about the enemies at the end and that I would actually even turn in my friends. I wonder how much of that is a critique of Polis's kind of uncritical defense of Gorgias. So he's talking to this little trio, or he doesn't know Calicles is going to come up. But, you know, Calicles kind of strikes me that he's probably like, Thrasymachus was in Republic, like off in the corner like a beast. Like they can tell he wants to jump in, right? I mean, that's a complete gloss on my end, but that's, that's how I view it. So I do think that as I try and find more of a purpose for that little section because he flips things, it's an interesting perspective that he gives. Right there is that. I think one way to read that is that he's critiquing this blind loyalty that exists to Gorgias, that if you really cared for Gorgias, you would then want him to be punished. You would actually want him to be turned in and be disciplined for the sake of his, for his own soul. Because how, how does Polis start? I guess you could see the book in how does Polis start the conversation? Is this defense then you know of Gorgias so well?
- [140:46]
B
He, he. If I can, if I can comment on that, because the, it's also undoing the war motif that may be being carried through, right? If we're at war, then we're enemies. That means I shouldn't even be trying to help you understand this. I should let you want to be a tyrant and you shouldn't be trying to correct me. And neither of us should be doing anything with Gorgias. Right? And the fact that we've been doing this for each other, with each other, shows that we're not enemies. If we're following out the consistency of our argument, we're not enemies because we're actually helping each other. And so we're doing good for each other as friends. So it might even be undoing that or like countering that, that war mode, war mentality that they might have had coming into it. Gorgias and Polis, anyways, Calicles obviously is going to revive it, but.
- [141:42]
A
Yeah, but I, I really like that. No, I really like that. The reason, one reason I really like that is because it should show us that Socrates is not the enemy of Gorgias and Polis, at least at this part in the dialogue, that he's not the enemy. And that, that, that's a question of who is the war being made upon and what is the war actually for? Is he against people or is he against a certain idea that has popped up? And so our going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, the idea that, that Socrates actually has, I keep using good faith, I'm an attorney, sorry, but that he has this like, you know, good faith effort to actually try and bring truth to these guys. He's not simply trying to actually just war against them and destroy Them. I think you could really lean into this passage that if he was truly trying to be their enemy, he would not try to save them. Unless, you know, obviously the pushback on that is like, the only reason he's doing this is for the sake of those listening. So he's chosen to have this conversation not for the sake of Gorgias or Polus, but. But for the sake of the young men around them that. That see Gorgias as this type of, you know, idol. So, again, I mean, I think these are good conversations to have as we kind of look at the intentionality of Socrates in the text.
- [142:58]
B
Yeah.
- [142:59]
A
Well, Dr. Bianco, I've greatly appreciated this conversation. I thought it was really good. I think we helped kind of unearth, you know, several different things. It's a beautiful dialogue. I think it's really worth people's time. So I really want to say, you know, thank you for your time and attention on this.
- [143:13]
B
Well, likewise. Thank you. This was a fantastic conversation. You are very good, a very good conversationalist and reader. I learned a lot. So, I mean, getting the chance to reread it and then to discuss it with you, I like the mind and the questions that you bring. I really enjoyed it. So I appreciate your inviting me on and, and your kind reflections on my son and having had him on. I mean, if I were. If I were a spirited man, I would be jealous that he got to go first. But. But I. I'm going to go to confession for that. So. No, it's. It's been excellent. So thank you. I appreciate it.
- [144:04]
A
Yeah, I appreciate the kind words and I. And I'm in debt, I think, to everyone who's. Who's come on the podcast because I get the benefit of having these conversations then hopefully those who are listening, because that's our goal, is that we can be kind of like a small group setting and work through these great texts together. The authors are the teachers. And so I've also benefited greatly from the people who have come on the podcast to discuss Plato. And kind of growing along with everyone, I think, is part of the beauty. Remind everyone where we can find out more about, like, your work and the Searcy Institute.
- [144:34]
B
Yeah, sure. The. So the Searcy Institute is where I do all of my stuff. Searcyinstitute.org C I R C E Just like the woman from the Odyssey who traps Odysseus for a while. And so searcyinstitute.org we online, we have webs, we have blog posts there articles and stuff. But the big stuff is our conferences or our training programs. I offer courses online there from time to time and then speak at our conferences. So all year round, you know, there's stuff going on. Every spring we have. We have a conference somewhere in the country. Every summer, we have a national conference, usually in Charleston, South Carolina. And then. Then every fall we have a conference as well, like usually October. So March, July, and October is our big stuff. Then the regional ones are easier to get to, easier to get in. The national coverage sells out the day the registration opens, within an hour or so. Yeah, that's good.
- [145:39]
A
You guys are doing good work. I think classical education is a big part of our cultural renewal. We have a little classical school here in Tulsa that I'm a big fan of. And so. No, I appreciate all the work that you're doing.
- [145:50]
B
Yeah. And honestly, doing this was brilliant because you're going to get such an education out of this. And then. And then, I assume. I mean, and then you're sharing it with other people. But the secret. You secretly did this for your own education, didn't you?
- [146:04]
A
That's right.
- [146:04]
B
No, no.
- [146:06]
A
Yes. All ulterior motives. This is my own tutoring program, and so I appreciate everyone coming on, so. No, but it is. It is a joy, I think, to learn along everyone else and to pursue that. It really is. It's really humbling, but also something, I think, very beautiful. And when you. When you find this, right, when you find something that's beautiful, like the great books, like Plato and this wonderful tradition, it naturally wants to be shared. You naturally other people into it. And that's what I found. I found something very beautiful in the great books tradition, particularly as received by the church and by Jesus Christ. And so we approach these books as these kind of cultural guidestones, these. These guideposts throughout history, and we learn from them. But I think there's something very beautiful here. So, again, I appreciate you coming on and appreciate all your work with the Searcy Institute.
- [146:55]
B
Thanks, Deegan.
- [146:57]
A
All right, everyone. Next week we'll be finishing the Gorgias. We'll be doing part three of the discussion with Callicles, and we'll be doing that with Dr. Greg McBrayer of the New Thinkry podcast. In the interim, go Visit our website, thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have all kinds of resources to help you read the great books. Check us out on X, where we're very active. We also have all of our episodes up on YouTube. And we will see you next week. Thank you, everyone.