Episode 360: 'Gorgias' by Plato

Summary

The Great Books Podcast: Episode 360 - 'Gorgias' by Plato

Host: John J. Miller
Guest: Agnes Callard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago
Release Date: February 18, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 360 of The Great Books Podcast, hosted by John J. Miller of the National Review, the focus is on Plato's seminal work, Gorgias. Agnes Callard, a distinguished professor of philosophy and author of The Agency of Becoming and Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, joins Miller to delve into the depths of this classic dialogue. The discussion explores the nature of rhetoric, morality, and the philosophical life, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of why Gorgias remains a cornerstone of Western literary canon.

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Why 'Gorgias' by Plato is a Great Book

Agnes Callard opens the conversation by highlighting the significance of Gorgias in its deconstruction of cynicism. She explains:

“One reason is that it's an attempted deconstruction of cynicism. So Socrates encounters a bunch of different people who express a bunch of different forms of moral nihilism. And he shows you that their positions don't make sense, but they can't be sustained. That if you just ask them to keep explaining themselves, eventually they'll contradict themselves. And so it's a kind of just full throated defense of morality.”
[00:49]

This sets the stage for understanding how Gorgias serves as a robust defense of moral philosophy against emerging nihilistic views.

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The Structure and Genre of Socratic Dialogue

Miller poses a fundamental question about the nature of Socratic dialogues:

"What genre of literature are we talking about here? This is a work of philosophy, of course. When you read it, it's like a script almost. Maybe the script to a podcast."
[04:53]

Agnes elucidates that Socratic dialogues are neither strictly fictional nor purely nonfictional. They are crafted to represent the essence of Socratic conversations, capturing the intellectual spirit rather than providing exact transcripts:

“They're not exactly fictional texts, and they're not exactly nonfictional. ... they are meant to represent what it was actually like when Socrates talked to people.”
[04:53]

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Character Analysis: Socrates, Gorgias, and Plato

The dialogue introduces Gorgias, a renowned rhetorician from Leontini, who exemplifies the art of persuasion without necessarily grounding it in truth. Callard explains Gorgias’ role:

“He's somebody who was an expert in using persuasive tactics to get you to believe things that you would otherwise not have been willing to believe and teaching other people to do the same.”
[07:22]

Plato, Socrates' student, is discussed not as a character but as the author who immortalizes Socratic dialogues. Callard notes:

“Plato's dialogues ... are just conversation. Socrates in conversation with all different people.”
[08:46]

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Key Themes and Discussions

1. Nature of Rhetoric:

The dialogue begins with Socrates questioning Gorgias about rhetoric, probing beyond the superficial understanding of making speeches:

“Socrates asks, what do you know? What do you do for a living? And Gorgias says his expertise is rhetoric, and we should call him a rhetorician.”
[02:46]

2. Socratic vs. Gorgian Persuasion:

A pivotal discussion contrasts Socratic and Gorgian methods of persuasion. Callard emphasizes:

“Gorgias says, look, oratory is really powerful because it's not really important whether you know anything. What's important is whether you can manipulate the minds of people around you.”
[13:34]

In contrast, Socratic persuasion is portrayed as a mutual quest for truth, where success isn't about defeating an opponent but about mutual understanding:

“Socratic persuasion means if you end up persuading me, I've succeeded. That's just as good as me persuading you.”
[12:12]

3. Morality and Humility:

Socrates’ approach ties rhetoric to moral virtue. He advocates for humility in discourse, valuing the pursuit of truth over personal victory:

“What kind of person am I? I'm happy to have a mistaken idea proven wrong and I'm happy to prove someone else's mistaken idea. I'm certainly not less happy if I'm proved wrong than if I proved someone else wrong.”
[16:21]

Callard further explains Socratic humility as recognizing the necessity of others in the quest for truth:

“Thinking about what's good for yourself ... is not something you can do by yourself. You need other people to help you think.”
[17:16]

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Modern Relevance of 'Gorgias'

Agnes Callard articulates the enduring relevance of Gorgias in contemporary discourse:

“We're living at a time where people often bring up sort of the difficulty of public discourse and the ways in which it degrades easily into kind of, of politicized name calling.”
[31:41]

She connects the dialogue's exploration of rhetoric and morality to current challenges in public and political conversations, where debates often devolve into zero-sum conflicts rather than collaborative searches for truth.

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Insights from 'Open Socrates'

Transitioning to her own work, Callard discusses the concept of Open Socrates:

“It's taken from [Symposium] that Socrates sort of lies open, that the valuable things about Socrates are things that you don't have to read between the lines. There aren't secret messages.”
[24:33]

She argues that Socratic inquiry is inherently open and accessible, promoting philosophical engagement beyond rigid academic confines. Socratic inquiry involves cooperative dialogue where participants aim to uncover truth collaboratively rather than compete for victory.

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Philosophical Life and Socratic Inquiry

Miller ties Socratic inquiry to the notion of a philosophical life, as outlined in Callard's book:

“A philosophical life is a life that makes room for that kind of inquiry. ... there's a kind of Socratic dimension to our lives that we could explore to a greater degree than we do.”
[27:16]

This perspective encourages embracing philosophical practices in daily interactions, fostering deeper understanding and mutual growth.

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Conclusion

In wrapping up the discussion, Callard underscores the timelessness of Gorgias:

“The Gorgias diagnoses ... our natural and innate tendency to map an inquiry onto a kind of zero sum contest.”
[31:41]

She emphasizes that Plato's work offers profound insights into the nature of rhetoric, morality, and the philosophical life, providing valuable lessons for navigating contemporary discourse and personal growth.

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Final Thoughts

John J. Miller thanks Agnes Callard for her insightful analysis of Plato’s Gorgias, encouraging listeners to engage with this classic text to better understand the intricate balance between persuasion, morality, and the pursuit of truth.

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Recommended Reading:

Agnes Callard recommends the Hackett translation of Gorgias by Donald Zale, known for its accessibility and fidelity to the original text.

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Connect with the Podcast:

Listeners are encouraged to subscribe to The Great Books Podcast for more in-depth discussions on classic works of Western literature and philosophy.

Transcript

[Agnes Callard]

Foreign.

[John J. Miller]

Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about Gorgais by Plato. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review and listening to a production of National Review. This episode is sponsored by the Herzog Foundation. I'll tell you more about that in just a few minutes. Our guest is Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. She's the author of the Agency of Becoming and her brand new book is Open Socrates the Case for a Philosophical Life. She joins us by Zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Agnes, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.

[Agnes Callard]

Thank you.

[John J. Miller]

Why is Gorgias by Plato a great book?

[Agnes Callard]

One reason is that it's an attempted deconstruction of cynicism. So Socrates encounters a bunch of different people who express a bunch of different forms of moral nihilism. And he shows you that their positions don't make sense, but they can't be sustained. That if you just ask them to keep explaining themselves, eventually they'll contradict themselves. And so it's a kind of just full throated defense of morality.

[John J. Miller]

We're gonna talk about all that. What this dialogue says, who is Socrates? The meaning of this text, and also the case for a philosophical life. Borrowing from the subtitle of Agnes's new book. But ag start with how the text of Gorgias begins. He's just finished a speech. This, this character Gorgias has just finished a speech. Socrates shows up, not having heard the speech, with questions about who Gorgias is and what he does for a living. What's going on here? How does Plato get us going with this dialogue?

[Agnes Callard]

So I think Plato pretty deliberately has Socrates skip the long speech and jump straight into the Q and A. That move that the dialogue opens with is actually thematized in the dialogue itself, where Socrates will ask, you know, very shortly into the dialogue, he'll ask polis to stop making speeches and to actually talk to him. So it's, you know, in addition to being a dialogue about morality, it's also a dialogue about dialogue and the importance of dialogue. And so it sort of starts out that way with Socrates saying, I want to have a conversation with you, Gorgias. But there's also the question what the conversation is about. And what the conversation is about is just at the outset, just defining what oratory is. Socrates says he doesn't know what it is.

[John J. Miller]

He asked Gorgias, what do you know? What do you do for a living? And Gorgias says his expertise is rhetoric, and we should call him a rhetorician. These are words we know. Maybe, but. But what does Gorgias mean by them?

[Agnes Callard]

Gorgias means that he's an expert in making speeches, specifically long speeches. And I mean, this was true of the actual guy, Gorgias. He was an expert in making speeches and was famous for that. But Socrates wants to probe, what is it to be an expert in making speeches? Because everybody makes speeches like you and I are talking right now, right? And you know, Socrates says, well, shoemakers are really good at making speeches about shoes. No one's better at speeches about shoes than shoemakers. So Socrates wants to put Gorgias and ask him, what kinds of things do you make speeches about? It's as though Gorgias had said, I'm good at using words. And the rest of us said, well, we use words too.

[John J. Miller]

Sounds like he might be an influencer or if we're using a modern day term.

[Agnes Callard]

I think that the reason why Socrates is so interested in Gorgias and in this sort of category of the man who is an expert at using words is that he presents a kind of competition to Socrates that is an alternative to the kind of thing that Socrates is doing. And throughout the dialogue we see that come up in various forms. By the end of the dialogue, it's like a contest between Callicles way of life and Socrates way of life. So this dialogue really is about like two ways of life, and it opens with sort of two ways with words. The orator has one kind of way with words, and Socrates has another way with words.

[John J. Miller]

And I want to jump into that in just a moment, but let's back up and ask, what's a Socratic dialogue? What genre of literature are we talking about here? This is a work of philosophy, of course. When you read it, it's like a script almost. Maybe the script to a podcast. Perhaps it's a transcription of a conversation. Is it a work of fiction? At any rate, how do you define this Socratic dialogue? What is the genre?

[Agnes Callard]

It's pretty similar to a podcast, except that people are so nice to each other on podcasts. So the genre is a genre that came into being as the result of the practice of an actual person. So that's maybe the place to start. That is, there was a guy, Socrates, he lived in Athens in the 5th century BC and he went around talking to people and his conversations made a lot of progress. He arrived at a bunch of really interesting ideas. Some of those ideas are listed in the Gorgias, but he didn't Write any of them down. And his conversations had sort of two. He was very polarizing. He had two possible effects on people. So some people found him unbelievably annoying and sort of undermining and irritating. And, you know, eventually those people went out and they had him killed. But there was another group of people who found him just totally enchanting and fascinating and enthralling. And among that second group were people who then created the genre of the Socratic dialogue, almost like to memorialize Socrates. Like, we weren't going to remember him by means of his writings. And so the way that we remember him is because people started writing out what it was like when Socrates talked to people. And the only surviving instances of this genre are from Plato and Xenophon. And the Gorgias is by Plato. So this is such a text. They're not exactly fictional texts, and they're not exactly nonfictional. They're not exactly nonfictional because this is not a transcript of an actual conversation. Plato's memory probably wasn't good enough for that. But they're also not exactly nonfiction in that they are meant to represent what it was actually like when Socrates talked to people. And so the kinds of things he says in the dialogues are plausibly the kinds of things that he actually said when he actually did talk to people. And the audience for these dialogues was people who, you know, maybe some of them had met Socrates if they were very old or anyway, they would have heard secondhand. And so if people like Plato and Xenophon had completely changed the story, those people would have been like, wait a minute. That's not what Socrates was like.

[John J. Miller]

Socrates was a real person of history. So was Gorgais. You've already mentioned that. But who was he? And why is he at the center of this dialogue? Why does he even have his name on it?

[Agnes Callard]

So it's interesting because he gets the least airtime of the three interlocutors in the Gorgias. But he is the most famous by far. He was like a professional speech maker and teacher, right? A kind of teacher speaking. And he's not from Athens, he's from Leontini, which is, like, in Sicily. But he came to Athens when he was, I think, about 60 years old. And this visit was just a big deal. And so he's famous. Famous for, like, one thing that he made was a speech in defense of Helen, you know, Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships. And that the point of that speech is to showcase his incredible. He can persuade you of anything if he can persuade you that Helen was a good. Was a good guy. That's sort of the idea. So he's somebody who was an expert in using persuasive tactics to get you to believe things that you would otherwise not have been willing to believe and teaching other people to do the same.

[John J. Miller]

And finally, who was Plato? He's our author. He's not a character, if that's the right word. Even he's not a character in the text. We do know he's obviously a student of Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle. But how does Plato plug into this dialogue?

[Agnes Callard]

Plato is one of these people whose life was transformed by an encounter or multiple encounters with Socrates. Strikingly, he doesn't show up in any of the dialogues. You might have thought that, you know, if you were one of Socrates acolytes and then you were going to write about Socratic conversations, you would just do a bunch of conversations between Socrates and Plato. But he didn't do that. In fact, the dialogues are just all conversation. Socrates in conversation with all different people. So Plato's dialogues, his earlier dialogues, are thought by most scholars to be at least reasonably accurate representations of the historical Socrates and what his conversations were like. And then as Plato gets older and he keeps writing dialogues and then in some cases, you know, kind of treatise like the laws, what scholars think is that he's kind of branching out on his own, developing some of his own ideas that are distinct from the ideas of Socrates. So Plato was a philosopher, but maybe the central difference between Plato and Socrates is that Plato decided to do Socrates to do philosophy by writing stuff down, whereas Socrates did it by talking.

[John J. Miller]

So Plato wrote down Gorgias, our text for this show, and we've already described how it begins. The opening part then is this discussion about the nature of rhetoric. And does it boil down to their saying or concluding that there's a difference between substance and style?

[Agnes Callard]

I don't think that's quite right. I think that in some ways Socrates and Gorgias differ in having different styles. In a certain sense, the real substantive move would be that you have knowledge and you teach it to people. That's the ideal. That's what Socrates, the kind of person Socrates would like to be and he isn't. And so Socrates doesn't think that he can just offer you something of substance in that sense, but he thinks there are two different styles of speaking to people. And actually the difference between them is pretty fine, it's pretty subtle. But the difference is that when Gorgias motto is persuade, that is get people to believe the things that you think, even if you don't really know those things and you can't prove them. Socrates's motto also involves being in a situation where you don't really know things and you can't prove them. And he also tries to persuade people, but he adds a little wrinkle onto it. He doesn't put it this way in this dialogue, but he puts it this way elsewhere. His motto is persuade or be persuaded. That is, either convince someone of what you think or let them convince you of what they think. So Gorgianic persuasion means that if I try to persuade you of something, but you end up unpersuaded, or you end up persuading me I've failed. Socratic persuasion means if you end up persuading me, I've succeeded. That's just as good as me persuading you. And you know, at certain point in the dialogue, Socrates actually says it's in a way, it's better I'd rather be the one who gets refuted by you than have me be the one who refutes you. Because if you refute me, then I've learned something and so I've been benefited.

[John J. Miller]

You're listening to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review, and I'd like to tell you about our sponsor for this episode, which is the Herzog Foundation. Education is one of the most important issues shaping our nation's future, and the lion is here to keep you informed. Created by the Herzog Foundation, a leading national foundation dedicated to improving the quality of K12 education, the lion is your go to source for all things education as well as issues impacting families, parenting and culture. Whether you're a parent, grandparent, teacher, or education enthusiast, the lion delivers in depth reporting, thoughtful analysis and inspiring stories. From school choice to classroom innovation, the lion keeps you informed on the issues that matter most. Stay informed and inspired. Visit readlion.com that's r e a d l I o n readlion.com and subscribe today. Gorgias has a great example, a great illustration of his form of persuasion. He discusses a doctor versus an orator in trying to persuade a patient to take medicine, and Gorgais then says he has an advantage as an orator over his brother who's a doctor. In other words, I'm more likely to persuade the patient to take medicine than my brother, who's the expert doctor who really ought to know this stuff, right?

[Agnes Callard]

So Gorgias says, look, oratory is really powerful because it's not really important whether you know Anything. What's important is whether you can manipulate the minds of people around you. And that's what I have the power to do. You know, Socrates comes back to this idea of the ignorant person persuading at the very end of the dialogue. It's a wonderful passage where he says, callicles at this point is saying to him, aren't you worried that, like, maybe if you keep doing what you're doing, the Athenians are going to, like, get angry at you, and then they might even take you to court and they might even accuse you of stuff, and they might even kill you. And Socrates is like, yeah, Callicles, I'm not unaware of that. And he says, I'll be judged the way a doctor would be judged by a jury of children if a pastry chef were to bring accusations against him. Think about what a man like that, taking captive among these people could say in his defense if someone were to accuse him and say, children, this man has worked many great evils on you. He destroys your youngest by cutting and burning them. He doesn't feast you on a great variety of sweets the way I do. What do you think a doctor caught in such an evil predicament could say? So the thought is, Socrates is saying, look, I grant that I'm not going to be able to persuade the jury that I'm right. That's not a test of whether or not I am right.

[John J. Miller]

And the conversation then moves away from this question about what is rhetoric, as you suggest, and goes into bigger subjects about tyranny, evil, suffering, morality, virtue and more. It becomes a really large conversation about all these things.

[Agnes Callard]

Right. I think one of the really interesting things about the Gorgias is that it ties those two things together. That is, we might think, oh, the Socratic dialogue is just this form and Socratic argument. And the Socratic method just means, like, be reasonable in arguing and be open minded, et cetera. And that doesn't entail anything about, like, whether you're a good person, whether you care about justice, whether you would accept punishment for wrongdoing, et cetera. And Socrates wants to show you, no, these things are actually connected. That is, how you are with respect to speech and how you are with respect to morality are not unconnected from one another. And the kind of tie between them, or at least one very important tie between them, is the idea that what Gorgias is doing when he persuades people to take their medicine better than his brother, the doctor, or what the pastry chef would be doing when they accused the doctor in front of the jury of Children is flattery. That is a lot of the use of speech is really flattery. It's designed to manipulate the audience by.

[John J. Miller]

Making them be pleased and has little or nothing to do with the truth.

[Agnes Callard]

That's right. But in a way, Socrates focus is that it has little or nothing to do with what's actually good for the person. That is, when the pastry chef accuses the doctor in front of the jury of children, the pastry chef is misleading the children about what's of benefit to them. So maybe the point is, yes, it's a truth, but also it's a particularly important truth. It's a truth about your own well being.

[John J. Miller]

It also requires a kind of humility, doesn't it? You've already mentioned this amazing line from Socrates. I'm going to read it where Socrates says, what kind of person am I? I'm happy to have a mistaken idea proven wrong and I'm happy to prove someone else's mistaken idea. Wr. I'm certainly not less happy if I'm proved wrong than if I proved someone else wrong, unquote. That's a startling statement. It does require humility, doesn't it?

[Agnes Callard]

Yes, and I try to explain in my book the specific form of humility that it calls for. I think that Socrates, big innovation, he had many of them, but the one I would put as number one is that he discovered that that thinking was like a bicycle built for two, not one. That is that thinking about what's good for yourself, trying to inquire into the truth, at least when it comes to really important questions, is not something you can do by yourself. You need other people to help you think. And so he understands that he is kind of in a position of desperation in regards the people around him. He needs them to want to talk to him and he needs them to correct him. And what we might call arrogance is, from a Socratic point of view, just someone who hasn't yet realized how needy they are in relation to other people and that other people are their only hope for getting things right.

[John J. Miller]

Agnes, I just quoted from the edition of Gorgais that I'm using. But for our listeners, if they want to read Gorgais, is there an edition or translation that you prefer or recommend?

[Agnes Callard]

I like the translation by Donald Zale, and that's the Hackett translation. It's available very cheaply and it's also available in the Collected Works of Plato, which is edited by John Cooper. That's a nice volume that has all the dialogues, but I haven't exhaustively compared all the different Translations. So I really can't confidently say that it's better than the one that you're using.

[John J. Miller]

Now. I want to turn to your book. You have a fascinating line in the introduction to Open Socrates, and it's this quote. Talking to Socrates is like encountering argument in the wild in its natural habitat, unquote. What do you mean by that?

[Agnes Callard]

Maybe I can connect it to the sort of opening dispute in the Gorgias. So Gorgias says that I am an expert in speeches here. I mean the Greek word. When I use the word argument or speech or words, it's all the same Greek word, logos. Okay? So Gorgias is saying, I'm an expert in logos, and Socrates is, in his own way, a kind of exemplar of logos. And they're competing. Who's the real logos man? Is it Gorgias or is it Socrates? And you know, what Gorgias is saying is like, well, what it is to be the logos man, to be the master of logos, is to be able to use logoi to trick people, to be able to use logoi, speeches, words, arguments, et cetera, to get whatever you want. And Socrates has a different idea of what logoi are for. He thinks logoi, speeches, words, arguments are a way to probe and get at things. And when you start doing that with Socrates, even if you're Gorgias, even if you're committed to this other thing as being, you know, you're the representative of using words to manipulate, you kind of can't help but be like, oh, no, this is what they're actually for. Socrates is right. It's like you had a can opener and you were using it as a hammer, you know, all this time, and somebody brings a can and is like, look. Look what this thing can do. It's clearly made to do this other thing. And I think that's sort of what I meant by encountering logos in its natural habitat is that this is actually what argument was. It was designed to be integrated into a social encounter in which the people are openly correcting each other and being willing to be corrected.

[John J. Miller]

And the point is not to win the argument, as tempting as that is. We always want to win the argument, right? They mean something else, right?

[Agnes Callard]

So the shocking thing about Socrates is that he's not even tempted, according to himself, to win the argument. That is, he's like, what do I get out of that? You know, if I'm Gorgias, I can score points by winning an argument. I can look good, and then maybe more people are going to pay to take my speech classes. But if I'm Socrates and the only thing I'm doing, the only thing I'm up to is trying to figure out, okay, what actually is oratory. Is it better to be treated unjustly or to treat other people unjustly? Should you try to be just or to appear just? These are all questions that are discussed in the Gorgias. If my goal is just to figure out the answer to those questions, then there's actually no incentive for me to try to win.

[John J. Miller]

I wonder if the word argument is a bit of a loaded term, as you say. You can translate that word from the Greek into our language in different ways, but the word argument itself, in our language, it's a kind of pejorative. I mean, no one likes to. Some people like to argue, but arguing is unpleasant, isn't it? We don't want to do it, and when we do it, we want to prevail. So I wonder if that is a loaded word.

[Agnes Callard]

I think it's a loaded activity, actually. So think of the word is not the problem. That is, I think that when one person says one thing and the other person says the thing that you just said is not true, that is just very often going to degenerate. And this is what Socrates says to Gorgias. He says, I am worried about pursuing this discussion with you because I am worried that you are going to. It's going to devolve. So here's a quote from the Gorgias. I take it that you. This is Socrates talking. I take it that you, like me, have experienced many discussions and that you've observed this sort of thing about them. It's not easy for the participants to define jointly what they're undertaking to discuss. And so having learned from and taught each other to conclude their session. Instead, if they're disputing some point and one maintains that the other isn't right or isn't clear, they get irritated, each thinking the other is speaking out of spite. They become eager to win instead of investigating the subject under discussion. In fact, in the end, some have a most shameful parting of the ways, abuse heaped upon them, having given and gotten to hear such things that make even the bystanders upset with themselves for having thought it worthwhile to come to listen to such people. Okay, so Socrates is saying this because he's worried this is going to happen between him and Gorgias, that it's about to happen. And so the point isn't that the word argument is pejorative. The point is that we are not very good at disagreeing with one another. And that's a really interesting question. Why are we so bad at this? Why do we so easily take a disagreement about some question and map it on to some kind of conflict of interest between the parties as to which one gets to be the winner and which one gets to be the loser? That's in my book. I call that politicization. That in effect, argument, discussion, inquiry, disagreement gets politicized into, like, a battle of egos. I think that's why argument gets a bad name.

[John J. Miller]

Let's turn to your book, your new book, Open Socrates. I wanna know what the title means. It reminds me a little bit of Open Sesame. You know, the magical phrase, also open society, a term I associate with Karl Popper. But what do you mean? What is Open Socrates? Why is that the title of your book?

[Agnes Callard]

I did intend the Open Sesame Association. I didn't think of Karl Popper. But it's taken from a passage in Plato's Symposium where Alcibiades is describing Socrates as having these hidden statues of wisdom inside of him. And he is. He's saying, oh, most people don't know the real Socrates. They don't know, like, the secret. The secret possessions of Socrates that he only shows to his closest associates. And I got to see those, I, Alcibiades. So it's taken from that and the thesis of my book is that in fact, Socrates sort of lies open, that the valuable things about Socrates are things that you don't have to read between the lines. There aren't secret messages. Socrates didn't hide his views, he didn't hide the value of his practice. And it's not even today like Socratic inquiry is in some sense very unhidden in that it's sort of available to us. It lies open to us in almost every encounter.

[John J. Miller]

How would you describe Socratic inquiry, this term you just used? Sometimes we hear about the Socratic method and so forth. What is Socratic inquiry?

[Agnes Callard]

Socratic inquiry is when you are trying to figure out the answer to what in my book I call an untimely question. An untimely question is a question that comes at the wrong time. It comes after you've already got the answer to the question. And so that's a problem. If you already have the answer, it's very hard to ask. Ask the question because you think you already know the answer. But I think what Socrates found is that you can inquire into those questions with other people. The way it works is that the two participants are following different principles. The one person is following the principle, produce an answer, give an answer, say an answer, no matter what. If you have to guess, it's your job to sort of put forward something as true, to have some truth or other. That role, the role have some truth is the role that is taken up by Socrates, interlocutor. And then there's the Socrates role. The Socrates role says avoid falsehood. That is, don't accept that answer unless it's really proven itself to be correct. And so one person is trying to put forward things as correct and the other person is trying to examine those things and trying to say why he can't accept them. And Socratic inquiry is the positive progress that can be made by two people who cooperate in that way.

[John J. Miller]

Is that what it means to have a philosophical life? The subtitle of your book, Open Socrates is the Case for a Philosophical Life. Is that what you mean, pursuing exactly that or what do you mean?

[Agnes Callard]

I think a philosophical life is a life that makes room for that kind of inquiry. Yes. But I also think that many conversations, even in everyday life, have a little bit more space in them than we realize. And that extra space, that extra room is the room for one person to ask another a question, for one person to put forward an idea that they might not be sure of, but put it forward for examination, to challenge what someone says, to restate it, that there's a kind of Socratic dimension to our lives that we could explore to a greater degree than we do.

[John J. Miller]

If you could meet Socrates, would you want to do that? You mentioned a lot of people didn't like him. You could see why maybe they wouldn't. My own sense is I'd kind of like to meet him and I kind of don't want to, you know, here comes Socrates with all these uncomfortable questions when I just want to talk about, you know, last night's game. Would you like to meet Socrates yourself?

[Agnes Callard]

One of my kids favorite games is making me have like painful choices of you can meet Socrates, but you lose an arm. You can meet Socrates, but you only get to live one more year of life. You can meet Socrates, but you have to talk to him in ancient Greek. And to see, like, would you still take it? Would you still take it? Because they know how desperate I am to meet Socrates. Yes, I would love to meet Socrates.

[John J. Miller]

So let me jump in here. I'm not gonna ask you to lose an arm or anything, but if you had five minutes to talk to Socrates, what would you ask?

[Agnes Callard]

I mean, I think it would, you know, I think he would probably end up asking me stuff. That's usually how it goes, right? So, but, but I guess I think if I had to pick, if I get to set the topic, I think I would ask him about writing and, and about sort of the question of scaling philosophical interaction that is his. He came up with this thing that's a one on one thing and there's this question, could we scale it bigger? And you know, he seems to suggest, well, you can't have a lecture instead of a discussion because that's totally different. And he also thinks you can't have writing. Writing just is frozen. You know, a text says the same thing every time you read it, which suggests that like he wouldn't have been so happy with Plato just writing all this stuff down. Right. And so I'm just interested in talking to him about that, in about the question, can philosophical inquiry be scaled in any way beyond the one on one interaction? And is the problem with writing a problem with writing given the technology that was available at the time, or is it really a per se problem with writing? Those are two questions I would like to explore with Socrates.

[John J. Miller]

I think we all want to hear that TED talk from Socrates. Agnes, what's your story as a scholar? How did you discover Plato and Socrates and get into them and want to devote your life to studying them?

[Agnes Callard]

I first read Plato in high school as a high school debater. Very sort of similar to the Gorgias style of. I wanted to persuade people of things and to win debates. And I was told that if you put these quotes in from this thing called philosophy, you would win more debates. And so I read a bunch of philosophy to come up with quotes that I could stuff into my speeches. That was my first encounter with philosophy. It didn't work. I didn't win any more than I had before, but I did discover philosophy. And in college I just took a bunch of classes and was captivated by Socrates maybe in a lot of the ways that his contemporaries were. I wanted to, you know, I learned ancient Greek, I studied Greek history, I read a lot of dialogues, I wrote papers on them. But there was always something missing. Like I didn't really just want to study Socrates, I wanted to be him. I wanted to like inhabit his, the Persona that he created. And I think it's for that reason. It's because I have this sort of persistent desire to inhabit this Persona that is, yes, I would like to meet Socrates, but even more than that, I would like to be him. That that sort of sustained me motivationally for Many decades now, that project.

[John J. Miller]

Final question. What's the case for reading Gorgais today? It's a classic and timeless work, of course, but does it have a special relevance for us now? Does it say something to us today?

[Agnes Callard]

Yes, I think it does. I think that, I mean, we're living at a time where people often bring up sort of the difficulty of public discourse and the ways in which it degrades easily into kind of, of politicized name calling. And the Gorgias diagnoses that and tries to explain where it comes from and that it comes from someplace very deep. That is the reason why you have nasty arguments with your political enemies or why we see people having nasty arguments with their political enemies. Isn't that one of the two sides is evil? It's something about our natural and innate tendency to map an inquiry onto a kind of zero sum contest. So that's, that's one thing that's really significant about it. The other thing is the thing I mentioned at the beginning, which is that I think a lot of us have this worry that like, yeah, I want to be a good person and a moral person and I want to treat people well or whatever, but you know, I might just be being duped by like the morality system. Like I might have just like maybe, maybe I'm, maybe I'm just pretending to want to be a good person to make other people like me. And maybe that's all morality really is. And this is a dialogue that that takes really seriously that worry about morality, that it's just for show and tries to show you that that thought, that assertion, morality is just for show in the end collapses under its own weight.

[John J. Miller]

Agnes Callard, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about Gorgias by Plato.

[Agnes Callard]

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[John J. Miller]

You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through our [e-mail] on twitt. My handle is at heymiller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Great Books Podcast.