My thoughts: I think one aspect of coming to terms with Plato is avoiding the tendency of viewing him as a modern-day extremist. Given the fact that Western civilization is a "footnote" to the guy, it's hard to view present-day convention as revolutionary. If you take the two points, messianic figure and radical totalitarian, and connect them by a line, Plato likely falls somewhere on this line rather than directly over a point. This is even more plain to see when you plot the life of Plato and Socrates, as the death of Pythagoras (a messianic precursor) preceded the death of Plato by roughly 150 years.
Anyway, Gorgias covers that familiar complaint about rhetoric's ability to make the weaker argument appear stronger. The socratic argument is this: the ability to argue successfully against the true, and thus virtuous, answer, isn't a virtue at all.
If you're meeting with a doctor, you want the doctor to only have the ability to tell you the correct method to getting healthy again. Like the doctor, you want the statesman to only have the ability to tell you the correct method to get the state healthy again.
There are a couple weaknesses here, though. Socrates has argued in other places that people never do wrong willingly. That is, when people do wrong, they don't know that they're doing it. The following assumption, though, is that plain, unvarnished truth, when it's recognized, will lead to people making a right decision. But yet, you know plenty of people that will eat a donut rather than exercise, which illustrates the ultimate fight of the immediate right answer vs. the long-term right answer, which is also discussed by Plato elsewhere.
But rhetoric can be a tool to reinforce the ultimate strong, to make it appear more pallatable. Plato ascribes reinforcing the strong to the dialectic (socratic method) in that it ultimately exposes weaknesses through question and answer. Again, though, there is the short-term good vs. the long-term good, followed by recognition of the best choice vs. actually acting on the best choice. Rhetoric, as a tool, must be bouyed by a philosophy that favors ultimate good.
In the end, I think my position on politics and political ethics, in general, is the same as Socrates; that:
"I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute-I for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another. For I imagine that there is no evil which a man can endure so great as an erroneous opinion about the matters of which we are speaking and if you claim to be one of my sort, let us have the discussion out, but if you would rather have done, no matter-let us make an end of it."
The ultimate point: the effective use of rhetoric alone cannot define course of action. Doing so would undermine systematic rationality.
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias...
My thoughts:
I think one aspect of coming to terms with Plato is avoiding the tendency of viewing him as a modern-day extremist. Given the fact that Western civilization is a "footnote" to the guy, it's hard to view present-day convention as revolutionary. If you take the two points, messianic figure and radical totalitarian, and connect them by a line, Plato likely falls somewhere on this line rather than directly over a point. This is even more plain to see when you plot the life of Plato and Socrates, as the death of Pythagoras (a messianic precursor) preceded the death of Plato by roughly 150 years.
Anyway, Gorgias covers that familiar complaint about rhetoric's ability to make the weaker argument appear stronger. The socratic argument is this: the ability to argue successfully against the true, and thus virtuous, answer, isn't a virtue at all.
If you're meeting with a doctor, you want the doctor to only have the ability to tell you the correct method to getting healthy again. Like the doctor, you want the statesman to only have the ability to tell you the correct method to get the state healthy again.
There are a couple weaknesses here, though. Socrates has argued in other places that people never do wrong willingly. That is, when people do wrong, they don't know that they're doing it. The following assumption, though, is that plain, unvarnished truth, when it's recognized, will lead to people making a right decision. But yet, you know plenty of people that will eat a donut rather than exercise, which illustrates the ultimate fight of the immediate right answer vs. the long-term right answer, which is also discussed by Plato elsewhere.
But rhetoric can be a tool to reinforce the ultimate strong, to make it appear more pallatable. Plato ascribes reinforcing the strong to the dialectic (socratic method) in that it ultimately exposes weaknesses through question and answer. Again, though, there is the short-term good vs. the long-term good, followed by recognition of the best choice vs. actually acting on the best choice. Rhetoric, as a tool, must be bouyed by a philosophy that favors ultimate good.
In the end, I think my position on politics and political ethics, in general, is the same as Socrates; that:
"I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute-I for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another. For I imagine that there is no evil which a man can endure so great as an erroneous opinion about the matters of which we are speaking and if you claim to be one of my sort, let us have the discussion out, but if you would rather have done, no matter-let us make an end of it."
The ultimate point: the effective use of rhetoric alone cannot define course of action. Doing so would undermine systematic rationality.