Two Types of Power in Plato's Gorgias - J. C. Haden

Two Types of Power in Plato's "Gorgias"Author(s): James C. HadenSource: The Classical Journal, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Apr. - May, 1992), pp. 313-326Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and SouthStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297442 .Accessed: 25/03/2014 16:51

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TWO TYPES OF POWER IN PLATO'S GORGIAS

According to its traditional subtitle, the Gorgias is about rhetoric. E. R. Dodds, however, sees its central theme as "the moral basis of politics," and holds that the discussion of rhetoric is entwined with questions of eudaimonia.1 Paul Friedlander virtually dismisses rhetoric, and believes that there are two levels to the discussion-that of moral principles and that of different ways of life;2 in a rather cryptic aside he remarks that war and battle is also a theme. I propose that the central theme, linking all the others, is that of power. Since "power" and cognate words such as "strength" and "force" stud the dialogue, this is hardly a discovery. But there are two specific and contrasting types of power which need to be illumi- nated and distinguished to grasp the dialogue fully.

Since this is a matter of interpretation, the first step has to be to make explicit what hermeneutical principles are to be used. The basic one is the assumption that Plato actually wrote as the artist he is so often claimed to be. It follows that we are entitled to take cues from techniques more often found in literary criticism than in philosophical analysis.

If we assume that Plato, like any superb writer, took great pains with what he included in the dialogue and with the precise way he expressed himself, it seems reasonable that to understand exactly what he was trying to say we absolutely must give our maximum attention to every detail of a dialogue in the hope of insight. We cannot afford to push aside anything on the grounds that it is merely "literary"-i.e. ornamental-and not "philosophical." That is a modern distinction, stemming from a post-Platonic view of what philosophy is; for Plato there is no chasm between the two.3 The

IPlato, Gorgias: A Revised Text With Commentary (Oxford 1959) 1-2. 2 Plato 2: The Dialogues. First Period. Trans. Hans Meyerhoff (London 1964) 266.

3 It is true that in the Republic Plato suggests banishing most poetry from the polis, but at the same time he uses techniques like the myth of Er and the parable of the Cave for philosophical purposes. Above all, he chose to couch his ideas in the dramatic form of dialogues.

The Classical Journal 87.4 (1992) 313-326


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314 JAMES C. HADEN

spirit of the inquiry here, then, is well put by Ann Lebeck, when she says, speaking of the Oresteia:

Close analysis of language and imagery combined with analysis of the ideas involved yields the most far- reaching interpretation. Such an interpretation goes be- yond what is stated directly and elicits meaning from every mode of expression employed by the poet.4

Therefore, taking Plato as artist-philosopher with the utmost seriousness, I assume that it was entirely natural for him as a master writer to convey meaning by literary images, whether consciously or unconsciously. This is a more controversial working assumption, and even less customary among philosophers than the assumption of the total significance of the dialogues, though discussion of imagery is taken for granted in critical examination of, say, the tragic dramatists of the fifth century, as the reference to Lebeck makes plain. So it is worthwhile spelling out in more detail what is meant.5

First, it is important to see that an image in this sense differs from the et&0)ov which Plato condemned as the shadow of a shadow-the lowest segment of the Divided Line. Here "image" stands for a specific and concrete but still partially generalized idea, something between the data of perception and concepts of abstraction. Thanks to its concreteness it can be named and described, and hence the language of a text can express it directly and indi- rectly with a vast range of shades. A poetic passage can abound in

4 The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure (Washington, D.C. 1971) 1.

5 "Image" is a term often used fairly loosely. G. E. R. Lloyd, in a book containing many interesting and useful things (Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought [Cambridge 19661), employs it constantly but never clarifies what precisely he means by it, sometimes connecting it with analogy, sometimes with metaphor. His approach is primarily logical, and hence he seems to use the term broadly for any sort of concrete pictorial thought. Sleep, for example, can be personified as the "all- tamer," or described as "poured over" or "wrapped round" someone (202). He does grant that concrete images can and do express thought (211), and in early Greek thinking were a way of apprehending phenomena (207). Not until Plato is a conscious distinction drawn between images and demonstration (229-300). Possession of the distinction does not imply that both ways of showing cannot be used, of course.


TWO TYPES OF POWER IN PLATO'S GORGIAS 315

words suggesting an image, and can thus convey a context for the overt details of the poem, as there are references to nets and snares in Aeschylus's Agamemnon which quietly reinforce the audience's grasp of the plays action.

Second, the explicit concept of a literary image as an artistic device belongs, of course, to modern literary criticism; we cannot know whether or not Plato used it consciously, although he may have. But its poetic use as distinct from its critical function need not be explicitly conscious, since it is a technique which arises spontaneously in a host of specific forms such as simile, metaphor, and trope, part and parcel of the whole symbolic capacity of language.

Lebeck points out that in the Oresteia the images, such as nets and snares, recur in such a way that "each recurrence adds a new element to those with which it is associated. Often this expansion will blend two images previously separate...." Images are introduced proleptically, where the "word 'prolepsis' ... denotes a brief initial statement of several major themes en bloc.... Significance increases with repetition: the image gains in clarity as the action moves to a climax."6 The interpreter must view these recurrent images both in their immediate context and, more importantly, as bearers of meaning which only emerges as they develop through- out the work.7 This is not a mechanical process, but one subject to the hermeneutic circle from whole to part and back again. When related to each other and to ideas which they illustrate or the dramatic action which translates them into visual terms, the images cease to be discrete and arbitrary pictures and emerge as important components of the play's significance."8

The more concentrated his or her poetic expression, the more naturally an author seems to use the symbolic resources of language. The Greek lyric poets use them more than the epic poets, Aeschylus more than Euripides. In Plato's case, the brevity of the early, Socratic dialogues demands use of imagery, which is mainly abandoned after

6 Lebeck (note 4 above) 1-2. 7 In The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge 1979), Charles H. Kahn

proceeds similarly in his interpretation of the fragments, using the term "resonance" to designate something adapted from Lebeck's "prolepsis," since the original order of the fragments is unknown, unlike a play by Aeschylus or a dialogue by Plato. "On Reading Heraclitus" (87-95), his discussion of his hermeneutical principles, is well worth consulting. 8 Lebeck (note 4 above) 3.


316 JAMES C. HADEN

the middle period. The special point regarding the dialogues which sets them apart from lyric and tragic poetry is that a deliberately conceptual dimension emerges from the dramatic, literary foundation, so that the images conveyed by the combination of concrete detail of situation, action, character, and language lead the reader (or the hearer in ancient Greece) on to an explicitly conceptual level. The aim is the Socratic one of reaching clear consciousness regarding the crucial matters, but Plato is using the written word and indirect contact with his audience instead of Socrates's face-to-face style, which could take advantage of the many non- verbal clues one has in conversation as to the respondent's grasp of what one wants to communicate. Hence Plato must employ more tools than the purely analytical and logical ones of Socratic discourse.

It is this conceptual level which is now normally thought of as the philosophy in the dialogues, and we are likely to depreciate the role of the "literary" level so as to concentrate on the concepts.9 But the literary images in the dialogues are quasi- conceptual, carrying a freight of meaning along with their power to move the audience emotionally, a fact which en- ables the literary critic to find a moral content in a fictional text, whether consciously put there by the author or not. In Plato's case we do know that the purpose of the dialogues was a profoundly moral one, of course.

Being abstract and by the very nature of the dialogue form not flatly stated, the conceptual level may be elusive and hard to be clear about. If, however, we ground an interpretation in the concrete details of the text, which become guides to the mid-level of images, and use the images to reach the conceptual abstractions, we can reduce the likelihood of going astray at the philosophical level.

The test of these interpretive hypotheses, naturally, is their application: do they provide a fuller and clearer view of the dialogue? In the Gorgias, as in many of the early and middle dialogues if not all, the very first words suggest image and theme to us, casual as the opening passage may appear. Here

9 To quote Lebeck again, "Plato employs two modes of discourse: the dialectic and the mythopoeic or imagistic. His philosophy' as emergent from most of the dialogues comprises an interaction of the two." Here she is applying her technique to the Phaedrus, in "The Central Myth of Plato's Phaedrus," GRBS 13 (1972) 267, in a fashion which has many similarities to what I am working out here.

Lebeck has seen this also. On the Phaedrus she remarks that "the


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Socrates is accosted by Callicles, who speaks in the words of what must have been a familiar proverb to a Greek, to the effect that one should arrive early at a feast and late at a fight. In this case Socrates has come too late for a feast (ioprzl) of rhetoric just concluded by Gorgias, Callicles says. (As we discover later, he has arrived before a struggle, one with Callicles himself, who is ad- dressing him in such a friendly fashion now.) Friedlander points to the fight portion of the saying, but ignores the other half: in fact, both parts begin the process of unfolding important images for us, and the "feast" reference is at least as significant as the "fight."

Dodds, in his comments on this passage, discusses the seeming superfluity of ioprti~ at 447A5. He notes that some editors have deleted "such 'superfluous' words," and remarks that they all "could be glosses, but in most cases there is no proof whatever that they are, unless we assume that Plato was incapable of using an unnecessary word."" The approach I am proposing here does indeed assume just that, since a major artist in any medium avoids superfluity and includes only what contributes to the whole work. Hence the word is not superfluous but functional and used by choice.12 It emphasizes by repetition the first suggestion of an image, namely eating or ingesting, which will prove to be the image of one kind of power, the reference to fighting being an image for the other kind. At this very early point what is being said is naturally taken merely at face value, as inconsequential pleasantry, but it is in fact proleptic, in Lebeck's useful term, and leaves a trace which will be broadened and deepened as we advance.

As the dialogue continues the image of eating is suggested again and again, and developed in various ways. The second occurrence is in the discussion with Polus at 462-63, where Socrates sets up his elaborate proportion in which gymnastic is to cosmetics as medicine is to cookery, and legislation is to sophistic as justice is to rhetoric. In the remainder of the dialogue Plato is mainly interested in only half of this proportion, the one in which justice

prologue and following conversations between Socrates and Phaedrus ... set in motion major themes of the dialogue here enacted on the level of banter and small talk" (ibid. 283), but she reads backwards to point to the adumbrations and does not use them to help understand later passages.

11"Dodds (note 1 above) 189. 12 We cannot ignore the possibility of additions by other hands, but that

should be the last resort in interpretation.


318 JAMES C. HADEN

: rhetoric : medicine: cookery. We hear no more of cosmetics, but a great deal about eating and cooking.13

The eating image is picked up again in Socrates's colloquy with Callicles, where the life of pleasure advocated by the latter is said to consist of maximum, perpetual intake, for which eating and drinking are the image (494-96). At 494B the Calliclean ideal is said to be the life of a stone curlew, popularly believed to be constantly ingesting and excreting. And at 495D there is a little exchange, in which Callicles and Socrates address each other formally, naming the other's deme. Deme names were regularly punned on in Old Comedy, and commentators have noticed that Socrates's deme, Alopek&, can be read as a pun on "fox,""14 but they have not seen that Callicles's deme, Acharnai, is also a pun. In his History of Animals Aristotle says that there is a voracious fish, the &xd&pvaq, which has the unpleasant habit of biting off the posterior half of the grey mullet as the latter swims in schools.'5 Simply by itself this might be merely coincidental, but given the way in which the eating image (especially prominent just here) runs through the whole dialogue, the pun seems intended and significant.' The only other interpretation of this passage that has been proposed is that the two are parodying legal writs,17 but even if we accept that, it is entirely compatible with the punning; a literary passage may do two things at once.

13 E.g., 491A, 500B & E, 518B for cooking. 14 Fox = O&cXnti. For deme names in comedy, see David Whitehead, The

Demes of Attica 508/7-ca. 250 B.C.: A Political and Social Study (Princeton 1986) 328-38. In Greek folklore the fox was proverbial for cunning and shiftiness. There is also the very old saying, perhaps going back to the pseudo- Homeric Margites and used by Archilochus in a famous fragment, about the fox knowing many small things and the hedgehog one large thing (see J. M. Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus Vol. 2 [London 1931], p. 174, fr. 118). At Republic 365C Plato, in speaking of virtue which is only a facade, approvingly quotes a few words from Archilochus on the fox's deceptive- ness. Aristotle mentions at Hist. An. 607a3 a breed of Laconian hunting dog, the &Xwnsei, which was thought to be a cross between dog and fox; later in the dialogue (515E) Callicles hints at Socrates's Spartan sympathies.

15 Hist. An. 610b11-19. The modern name of the &~adpva; has not been determined. Perhaps the pairing of &X&pvac and &wisic; is another parallel to the feast-fight contrast.

16 Indeed, the form in which Callicles's deme appears, 'AXapvei;, sounds very like an alternative form of a&Xpva;, namely &Xapvc6;.

17 Dodds (note 1 above) 308.



This image of eating, then, gives us the clue to the first kind of power in the dialogue. Ingestion or engulfing, in which the eater negates the independent selfhood of the other, is a metaphor or image for the power of the sophist. This may look farfetched at first sight, but let us pause briefly to view the general problem of interper- sonal contacts.

When two individuals meet, especially for the first time, there is always a question as to just what the relation between the two will be, even though the uncertainty may lie below the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Underneath their overt words and gestures two persons touch, so to speak, in a way that is usually indeterminate at first, needing to be resolved. This is obviously a delicate matter, requiring not a little self-awareness to detect fully. Since social forms and habitual behavior patterns often mask what is happen- ing, normally we are likely to notice it only in certain striking instances.

Easy as it is to dismiss on positivistic grounds this almost ectoplasmic shock of self on self, in the case which interests us here, that of the Greeks, there can be no dispute about the reality in ancient Greece of what has been called the "contest system," in which everyone competes against everyone else for public pres- tige.'8 The contests are zero-sum "games": i.e., someone must lose when someone else wins. Winning occurs when either by use or by threat of force something valuable (life, goods, land, and so on) is taken from the other person; or, more peaceably, by publicly competing with others in a formal situation where there are judges who award the prizes. We can add to this the taking of something through stealth and craft, as Hermes stole the cattle of the Sun. The most important prize is esteem, whatever else may be included; a wreath of wild olive, wild celery or laurel has little intrinsic value.

At the encounter of two individuals each must resolve the question of his or her status relative to the other. The status may be decided by a contest between them for one to dominate the other, but there are other possible resolutions. The meeting can be aborted, either by one refusing the encounter through timidity or by one simply ignoring the other through indifference or disdain. The contact may then be broken off entirely or be artificial and lifeless.

18 See Alvin W. Gouldner, The Hellenic World, A Sociological Analysis, Part I of Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (New York & Evanston 1969), Chapter 2: "The Greek Contest System: Patterns of Culture."


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In a third resolution, also non-competitive, the persons may recognize and value each other as equals. We may suppose this to be the common case, but in practice it is rarer than either of the first two, however admirable it may seem. In a variant of this third resolution, one person may sense that he or she is stronger than the other, but want to use his or her strength to enhance the strength of the other, moving toward equality.

The question appropriate to the dialogue is, how to see an encounter between a sophist or an adherent of sophistic persuasion and another person. The position of the historical Gorgias appears to have been that the psyche is integral with the body, and that logoi, words, act on the psyche in a quasi-physical manner parallel to the action of drugs on the body. According to Gorgias, the power of logos is to manipulate and mold the psyche "as it wishes."19 Further, logos is not subject to objective reality, but is itself an independent agent; speech being a human convention which we cannot transcend, together with its relations to psyche it effectively defines reality for us. The closest we come to truth is 86?a, opinion, and persuasion operates through a kind of deception, &~Airl, hardly a view acceptable to Plato.

If we look at irrational, emotional persuasion, it does seem to be most like the first form of encounter, domination of one by the other. Its character is in fact easier to present in an image than analytically in words. The aim of the persuader is to assimilate the other to himself or herself, to make the other like himself or herself or conform to his or her wish, and in doing so to override the difference and independence of the other. Even if the persuader does not himself or herself in fact subscribe to what he wants the other to accept, as in the case Gorgias mentions (465B) of a sophist's ability to persuade a sick man to submit to unpleasant treatment by a physician, in order to be effective the persuader must appear to the other to accept it himself or herself.20 The appearance of sincerity is crucial to the actor, the politician, the seducer. Genuine sincerity, in fact, is even more powerfully convincing, in proportion to the intensity of the conviction.21

19 The most relevant texts here are Gorgias's Helen and Palamedes, especially Helen 10-14. See Charles P. Segal, "Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos," HSCP 66 (1962) 99-155, for a detailed study of the matter.

20 We might think of the homely picture of a parent trying to get a recalcitrant child to take a medicine or to eat a disliked food by going through the motions of enjoyment. 21 Gregory Vlastos says, apropos of Protagoras: "A man who bases his



In the case of someone who does sincerely accept what he or she wants to persuade the other of, but whose acceptance is only emotional and who has only emotional ways of persuading the other, any resistance of the other to persuasion is irritating. The persuader is not interested in reasons for resistance; his or her urge is to eliminate the irritant from his or her consciousness. Making the other like or subservient to himself or herself will achieve that, and Socrates points out to Callicles how the tyrant generates his own likeness in those close to him (510B-E; cf. 513B-C). If, of course, the other stubbornly persists in his or her oppo- sition, the urge can bring different solutions to the problem. The irritation can be disposed of by breaking off contact with the other, or in the extreme case by eliminating the other altogether. Polus talks good deal about the desirability of being able to kill whomever one will, in one breath with the desirability of despoiling others of their goods (466D, 468E, 471).

Although Polus seems to derive his enjoyment simply from contemplating such bloodthirsty notions, Callicles, as the man of action, is the sort of person who would be willing to do more than imagine, and it is that third section of the dialogue where the image of ingestion is most elaborately developed and attached to Socrates's respondent. Socrates, we note, has quietly challenged Callicles early on to convince him and bring him to agreement (488A), as he did earlier with Polus (472B), and until the end of the dialo ue he remains unpersuaded and hence an irritant to Callicles.

claim to wisdom on his mere ability to impose his thoughts on others is much less likely to succeed in this very object than one who bases it on his ability to change their views in such a way that the result will be for their own good- their good as judged by themselves and by whatever norms are acceptable to themselves. A doctor who does not undertake to do his best to make his patients feel well, and says his job is just to make their feelings agree with his, is not likely to have any patients." (Introduction to the Protagoras [Indianapolis 1956] xxii). But this fails to analyze the sophistic stance deeply enough; it cannot distinguish between a conscientious doctor and a "Doctor Feelgood," who gratifies his patients by liberally dispensing mood-altering drugs. The root issue is one of objective welfare versus subjective welfare and the propriety of the very norms of the patient, in Plato's view.

22 Another way to look at this kind of interaction is from a more phenom- enological psychological standpoint. A version of this can be found in my


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Eating is the first image of power in the dialogue. But Plato's purpose seems to be not only to exhibit the nature of sophistic power but to contrast it with a different sort, just as there is both false and true rhetoric (503A). Indeed, rhetoric and power are not only twinned, but one is a reversed, mirror image of the other, as suggested in the matched articulation of flattery and tendance Socrates offers Polus at 464-65.

The proleptic presentation of beneficial power at the outset, where the second half of the proverb speaks of fighting as op- posed to feasting, provides the clue to its nature. What we thus expect to find is a thread of reference to conflict and contention running through the entire text. In fact, overt references of that kind are fewer than references to ingestion, but this is not surprising since the whole dialogue presents an image of struggle simply by showing Socrates at grips with three different opponents. In the proverb, "fighting" suggests something to be avoid- ed, yet as with most of the concepts in the dialogue there is an ambiguity that needs to be resolved.

From the Socratic point of view what looks like fighting is not necessarily a bad thing, to be shunned. War is not the only kind of contest, nor need all contests be zero-sum. There is also the example of the athlete striving against a respected opponent, where one can lose with honor, or of the trainer contesting with the athlete in order to develop the latter's body and skills.

The key text comes late in the dialogue, after what began as Socrates's rather friendly sparring with Gorgias has escalated to the intensity of his engagement with Callicles. The theme of therapeia is introduced early, when Socrates, in setting up the elaborate proportionality at 463, contrasts it as tendance of the soul with coxacei'a, flattery or pandering, and it is referred to often there- after. At 521A Socrates calls his effort to care for the Athenians, his therapeia, a struggling with them, 8taaXoOeat-precisely

what we have seen him doing with his fellow citizen, Callicles. This is not a desire for domination or elimination, as is made plain by the relaxed tone of his exchange with Gorgias himself; in dialectical engagement with others Socrates has carefully disclaimed that he is acting from


By looking at just what happens in all three parts of the dialogue as marked off by change of respondent, we can see Socrates's constant technique and aim, as adapted to the unique character of each of his interlocutors. The thrust of his question- ing is to find in the other some solid point of value, where the other will take a stand. As Robert Cushman has noted, Socrates's purpose in the Gorgias "was to arouse from slumber true opinions which each[respondent]feigned to disavow but really believed."23 In terms of the wrestling image, his aim is to make his respondent find one firm spot on himself on which to maintain his balance and to use as a fulcrum around which self-reconstruction can begin.

In the case of Gorgias, this balance point is the admission of the importance of arete in those who acquire rhetorical technique from him (459D-460A). With Polus, it is the admission that doing wrong is uglier than suffering wrong (474C). Callicles is a tough- er case, and Socrates must probe very deeply, going so far as to hold up before him the spectacle of a catamite's enjoyment of pleasure before he will admit that some pleasures are squalid (494E). But in each instance the message is that here is a value which the respondent accepts and that to abandon it is to lose one's footing and one's bearings in life. Consistency within oneself is vital (482C), but consistency obtained by renouncing all values other than pleasure or power leads only to a pleonectic Barmecide feast.

With each respondent, also, a vision of others is involved. Gorgias must be concerned with virtue in his students, Polus must recognize that the ugliness of wrongdoing announces something about the wrongdoer, and Callicles must see that one engulfed by loathsome pleasures is one who has abandoned any claim to respect. And at the same time, each must see himself in the mirror of the other: Polus, for instance, must realize that by his own admitted principle if he does wrong he himself is ugly to behold.

It is easy to confuse Socratic therapeia through dialectical inquiry with sophistic persuasion. The effect of logic and rational analysis on those more accustomed to emotional governance of their minds can feel like a sort of domination and loss of self, especially when the logic leads to uncomfortable conclusions. It is easy enough to observe this reaction today; in Plato's time logic was embedded in thought and discourse, more felt than seen, so Socrates's cheerful willingness to "follow the argument where it

23 Therapeia: Plato's Conception of Philosophy (Chapel Hill 1958) 308.


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leads" was a strange and unfamiliar stance. For others, the power of reason would seem a threatening, alien force, not readily distinguishable from sophistic engulfment.

Callicles illustrates this in his responses to Socrates's argu- ments. At one point (505 ff.) he just withdraws from the dialectic to escape it, and eventually remarks (513) that although he obscurely feels that what Socrates has said is right, still he cannot bring himself to believe it, that is, to identify himself with it. For the self-centeredness which craves sophistic power, reasoning is merely a tool like any other, as the real-life Gorgias viewed words as entirely comparable to drugs. The sophistic personality dislikes and distrusts submitting to the impersonal power of reason, which is controlling and not controlled, out of fear of loss of individuality.

But the central point is exactly the question of the individual person. Here again Gouldner's analysis can help us. Various people have pointed out that the time of Socrates is the time when a new and more individualistic sense of self is coming into being in Greece, fostered by the dissolution of time-hallowed social patterns. As Gouldner says, this new sense of self has two main factors: first, a feeling of potency, and second, a grasp of personal individuality and identity. In archaic culture, derived from tribal society, the person was to a very large extent a function of the group or groups he or she belonged to by birth. Even the hero of legend obtained his qualities by descent from a god or demi-god and from membership in a natural elite.

When this enveloping structure crumbles, the sense of secu- rity and potency it gave to individuals vanishes. Yet, as Gouldner points out,

One of the most important elements in the Greek conception of self is a sense of its individual power, the feeling that it is able, or ought to be able, to influence or control things in a sphere around it. To a great extent the Greek image of the person, or what one needs to be and to have in order to be a person, centers on the possession of power, on the imputed ability to make decisions governing one's own actions and to live under no one else's constraint.24

24 Goulder (note 18 above) 101-102.



This sense of power is especially crucial in a highly competitive society where one's self-image must continually be validated.

Further, the contest system sharpens the sense of the boundaries of one's self through resistance to others' demands or by imposing one's will on others.25 But there is another path to self- definition, and that is to see oneself from outside. To do this one needs to put oneself in a variety of roles, including the role of one's opponents. "Once the self can adopt the standpoint of widely different others toward itself, the more individual the person comes to feel: for each of the others sees him in somewhat different ways."26

Dialectical reason acts by stimulating the respondent to reorganize his or her personal chaos of concepts and values so as to enhance himself or herself as an individual. That is, individuality arises when the components of a self are knit coherently together, and its boundaries are drawn more definitely and consciously. And this is power, in the Socratic sense. In trying to formulate a Platonic definition of power, taking into account the whole of the Platonic corpus, Rupert Lodge arrives at the statement that power is "the creation of value by the least possible reorganization of what otherwise remains chaotic."27 The self which is coherent and clearly defined is effective, in the Greek sense of arete (cf. 503E-506E).

If one submits to the rule of reason,28 it not only provides the tool and standard of self-criticism, but also changes one's view of a relation to another person. When nothing stands above the self, then selves are inevitably in competition, but under the impersonal standard of reason, which humbles the self, the other takes on worth and interest and becomes someone to understand and to value, rather than to dominate or eliminate. The right

25 Ibid. 106. 26 Ibid. 115. Gouldner discusses the important social role of drama in

ancient Greece in this connection; the dialogues are, of course, dramas. It is worth noting that Socrates, when Callicles withdraws from the discussion in a sulk takes on his role also (505D ff.).

2FRupert C. Lodge, Plato's Theory of Ethics: The Moral Criterion and the Highest Good (London 1928) 380. The whole of Chapter 14 is devoted to the problem of power.

28 I do not intend to identify reason, in the classical and especially the Platonic sense, with logic as such. A logical strand can be abstracted from it, but a Plato-primarily-as-logician is a gross distortion of Plato-as-artist- philosopher.


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course of action becomes that of preserving or, even better, enhancing the other's personhood-which is precisely the Socratic mission of improving his fellow citizens. The object of Socrates's dialectic in his function as the true practitioner of the political art and citizen of the polis (521D) was to stimulate his respondents to become thinking and acting citizens, gaining individuality and independence under the guidance of reason, not to make them imita- tions of himself. Early in the Gorgias Chaerephon attempts to play the role of Socrates, and shows that he lacks Socrates's power in discussion; imitation is an insubstantial shadow, and the true aim should be to act from oneself.29

The purpose of Socrates's rational power, then, only looks super- ficially like battering down the independence of others or making them resemble himself. In aiding them to become the kind of deeply rational person that he represents, he is in fact freeing them to be independent of and therefore to be other than himself. Rationality as authentic in the sense employed by various existentialists-"the neces- sity for each of us to realize his own uniqueness""3--is fundamentally different from reason as a tool of emotion or as imitative or superficial. It is by surrendering oneself to the lucidity of reason, which Callicles is unwilling to do, that one makes oneself authen- tically rational, i.e., an agent who identifies with reason and acts from it. That is Socratic power.

t JAMES C. HADEN The American School of Classical Studies, Athens

29 In becoming an individual one does not become "like" another individual; individuality, like existence, is not a general quality.

30 Mary Warnock, Existentialism (Oxford 1970) 55-56. She puts the matter clearly when she says: "Authentic existence can begin only when we have realized and thoroughly understood what we are. Once we have grasped that human reality is characterized by the fact that each human being is uniquely himself and no one else, and that each of us has his own possibilities to fulfill, then our concern with the world ... can become authentic concern, to fulfill our real potentiality in the world" (55; emphasis in the original).


Article Contentsp. [313]p. 314p. 315p. 316p. 317p. 318p. 319p. 320p. 321p. 322p. 323p. 324p. 325p. 326

Issue Table of ContentsThe Classical Journal, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Apr. - May, 1992), pp. 313-416Volume Information [pp. 413-414]Front Matter [pp. 338-372]Two Types of Power in Plato's "Gorgias" [pp. 313-326]The Function of the Livian Reminiscences at Tacitus "Histories" 4.58. 6 and 62 [pp. 327-337]Aeneas and Rome: Pseudepigrapha and Politics [pp. 339-359]"Flow Backward Sacred Rivers": Tradition and Change in the Classics [pp. 361-371]"Syren Tully" and the Young John Adams [pp. 373-390]The ForumThe "Reasonable" Approach to Beginning Greek and Latin [pp. 391-396]Publishing in North American Classical Periodicals: A Revised Survey [pp. 397-405]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 406-409]Review: untitled [pp. 409-410]

Back Matter [pp. 411-416]

Two Types of Power in Plato's Gorgias - J. C. Haden

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