The Gorgias, Lawyers, and the Problem of Rhetoric
James Boyd White wrote that “[t]o the modern American lawyer the Gorgias presents both a puzzle and a threat.” Plato’s Gorgias is a dialogue that discusses justice, rhetoric, and the relationship between them. The Gorgias is meant to demonstrate to us that the good and the pleasurable are different, that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, and that the masses will reward sophistry and not virtue.
These things, taken together, show us that expounding wisdom is incompatible with public speech. If Plato is right about the nature of rhetoric and the passions of the mob, then none of us should be lawyers. Therefore, the lawyer must wrestle with and answer this Socratic dialogue.
Rhetoric in the Gorgias
According to the first dialogue with the eponymous Gorgias, “[Rhetoric] is being able to persuade by speeches judges in the law court, councillors in the council, assemblymen in the assembly. … And indeed with this power you will have the doctor as your slave, and the trainer as your slave.” Rhetoric is a sort of skill, and the sophist here is not concerned with the ends to which the speeches are directed, but the skill of making speeches as a way of exerting power.
From this, Plato extracts his first lesson on rhetoric. “Rhetoric … is a craftsman of belief-inspiring but not didactic persuasion about the just and unjust.” It is a skill of persuasion rather than truth. Nevertheless, it is a powerful skill, “[f]or there is nothing about which the rhetorician would not speak more persuasively than any other of the craftsmen in a multitude.” This distinction between truth and persuasion is emphasized later. Socrates defines rhetoric as experience “[o]f the production of a certain grace and pleasure.” It is like cooking, or makeup, which only make things seem good. Just as gymnastics and medicine make the body healthful, so do legislation and justice improve the health of the body politic. By contrast, cooking, cosmetics, and rhetoric “guess at the pleasant without the best … because it has no reasoned account…to which it administers.”
Because of this disconnect between truth and seeming goodness, rhetoric is particularly effective among the mob; that is, those who do not know. After all, the rhetor will not be able to persuade the doctor of what is good for the body, because the doctor will know more than the rhetor. Similarly, the rhetor will only be persuasive to those who do not know what justice is.
But if rhetoric is a powerful tool over the mob, and it is not oriented to the good, should we ever prefer the good? Even if we concede that rhetoric is only incidentally related to truth, shouldn’t we rather be the tyrant?
This is the question raised by the second dialogue. Polus brings up Archelaus, the tyrant of Macedonia. Archelaus killed his family to become tyrant, but he seems happy. Even if Polus concedes that rhetoric is a kind of flattery, shouldn’t we want to be the flattering tyrant, rather than the just man who is executed? Archelaus has committed the most unjust deeds, but which Athenian would rather be any of the Macedonians besides Archelaus?
Socrates’s argument is that one who is punished suffers pain but is better off for it. The best man is he who has no baseness of soul, but the second best is he who is released from baseness (through just punishment). The worst off is the man who is never released from his baseness—the tyrant. “[O]ne who does injustice and is unjust is altogether wretched, but more wretched if he does not pay the just penalty.”
Based on this, Plato develops his second claim: one must be just, even if one is injured for it. Rhetoric is a kind of flattery, which persuades without reference to the good. But we should not pursue this flattery even if it gives us power. That would be unjust, and the most wretched man pursues injustice free of punishment. Even if people prefer tyranny, they are letting their desire for pleasure cloud their judgment, as does an unhealthy man who eats for pleasure rather than health.
Callicles, the final interlocutor, more critically interrogates Socrates’s concept of the good. Callicles finds injustice shameful only by convention, not by nature. The weak banded together to “frighten[] away the more forceful human beings.” Socrates answers by drawing out a contradiction in the reality of Callicles’s aristocratic view. Socrates first establishes what makes men natural rulers. He asks if the many are not superior, because it is their force that lays down laws. Callicles scornfully calls this drivel, but a crack appears in the argument of the amoral rhetor. After all, is not the crowd, if untrained in justice, a rabble only worth their force? Isn’t the rhetor then submitting himself to them, if they are not swayed by virtue?
This is Plato’s crucial argument in the third dialogue. In this dialogue with Callicles, we learn that rather than being a mover of the mob, the rhetor is a slave to its passions. If the mob or the tyrant is as we believe each to be, neither will ever accept truth. In a tyrannical regime, the just man will not be able to practice virtuous speech, because “the tyrant … would fear him, and he could never become this man’s friend with his whole mind.” So, too, would a man seeking to speak virtuously to the mob. If Socrates testified to unpopular truths rather than pleasant lies, in the law court he “will be tried as a doctor accused by a cook would be tried among children. … [I]f he told the truth, that ‘I did all these things, boys, in the interest of health,’ how great a clamor, do you think, would rise up from such judges?”
We have now come to the problem of rhetoric. We learn from Gorgias that rhetoric convinces the mob rather than the knowledgeable. We learn from Polus that we should rather suffer injustice than do it, and that rhetoric is flattery rather than truth. We learn from Callicles that the rhetor will be a slave to the masses, who will not be ordered toward virtue. To practice rhetoric is to appeal to the people’s desire for pleasure. Even if we wanted to, we could not act as a doctor or judge, cauterizing wounds and dispensing justice. Only a virtuous people would accept the pain necessary for virtue, which would render rhetoric superfluous. Instead, we will be required to do injustice by providing only what they think is best.
This is, I think, a powerful critique for lawyers, and one we must grapple with. After all, are we not the rhetors described by Plato? If Plato is right, we must necessarily avoid certain questions of true justice, because our audience will not desire things that are uncomfortable for them. We must either sweeten our speech with lies or lose our arguments. To be a good lawyer, in this view, is to be fundamentally immoral.
A Lawyer’s Possible Response
There are three possible answers to the problem posed in the Gorgias. The first one is common but unsatisfying: deny the problem exists. One might say, “This doesn’t map onto what American lawyers do.” After all, one lone lawyer is merely a piece in a system, assigned an office, measured according to preset rules. It may be true that, in a freewheeling democracy or primitive law court, Plato’s critiques have some force; in our system, they miss the mark.
The lawyer has two possible responses. The first is that our courts have the same problems of the mob described by Socrates. Why would we expect our courts to be free of bias and prejudice, of incautious thinking about justice?
The other response is to accept that juries and judges are bound by rules that will constrain their bias, and move the question to the making of the rules. If one agrees with Plato’s Socrates, then we would not expect our system to be conducive to justice. This is a very pessimistic view of human reason, of course, but one worth taking seriously. What makes our Constitution, the common law system, or our statutes particularly likely to be virtuous?
Either way, to evaluate these arguments, the lawyer cannot avoid the problem by disclaiming the responsibility of evaluating the system. He cannot say “I am just a pawn in the system.” He must decide if the system is inclined toward virtue, and act accordingly.
Of course, the option is always open to speak justice openly and accept the consequences. This is the position Socrates himself argues for: “I consider how I might show as healthy a soul as possible to him who decides the trial. Bidding farewell, then, to the honors that come from the many human beings, I shall try both to live and to die, when I die, practicing the truth and really being as good as I have power to be.” A lawyer can speak justice, lose, and accept the consequences of losing.
The last option is that our system is virtuous.
In the Gorgias, Plato seems to have a grim view of public life. Elsewhere, he is less pessimistic. In the Phaedrus, Phaedrus and Socrates speak outside the city, as individuals. Phaedrus speaks of love and how love makes the lover sick and not of sound mind. Fear of losing the beloved causes the lover to misapprehend what is good and bad. Therefore, one should prefer the dispassionate lover. I think this can be productively read as a comparison between passion and reason. The lover is incapable of thinking rationally about his beloved on account of his passion, whereas the nonlover can consider the good. How similar is this to the state of the majority in the thrall of pleasure and the doctor willing to cauterize wounds?
Socrates, in his speech, gives an account of the soul as a charioteer with two horses. Socrates describes one of the horses as being desire, strong enough to pull the other horse and the charioteer along, despite the protestation of the other horse and the charioteer, that what is being done is shameful. The charioteer will, in the future, “blood[y] the evil speaking tongue and jaws and … give[] them over to pains.” One beats one’s desires into submission, achieving a life of moderation. If, however, one is able to align one’s passions with reason, then one is truly godlike: “[I]f the better parts of their thought conquer, leading them into a well-arranged way of life and philosophy, … they have won one victory in the three wrestling bouts that are truly Olympic.”
Plato gives us the hope of combining rhetoric with justice: “If it falls to you to be by nature rhetorical, you will be a rhetor of high repute when you have acquired in addition knowledge and practice.” If there is a way to combine rhetoric and justice, then that is by people having passions that direct them towards virtue.
It is open to one to say that America is a place where people have such passions. Perhaps our love of freedom properly directs our government toward liberty, or some other version of this argument. America has solved the thorny problem of rhetoric. We have created a people inculcated in virtue, such that their passions will be properly directed to do justice. If this is true, we can accept freely the Gorgias, and merely quibble that Socrates ignores a solution: an educated citizenry. I leave it to the reader to determine whether we are in such a situation.
No matter how one answers the problem, wrestling with the Gorgias is inevitable for the lawyer concerned with justice. Either we answer Plato adequately, or we cannot be lawyers.
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