Examined Lives_ From Socrates to Nietzsc - By James S. Miller Page 0,24

spectators. We are implicitly asked to judge a competition over how best to appraise the soundness of ideas.

At issue are a series of specific questions: Must an orator know the difference between right and wrong, the just and the unjust? Is it better to do wrong, or to suffer it? Is it better to wield power and enjoy pleasures without restraint, or to live a life regulated and restrained by an understanding of what is right and just? What must we know about a human being to understand “who he is”? What must a man know if he is to be good, just, and successful in his life?

In the course of the conversation, Socrates cross-examines Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, whose vehement defense of immoralism greatly impressed Nietzsche many centuries later.

What we witness is not simply a competition in words. By questioning Gorgias, Pollus, and Callicles, Socrates puts the character of each orator to the test. The spectator is invited to judge who that person is, by seeing if that person’s conduct consistently follows from his professed beliefs. Under questioning, Gorgias, Pollus, and Callicles are forced to contradict themselves.

The life and beliefs of the three orators depicted in the Gorgias don’t hang together, an existential incoherence that is even more important than any inconsistency in their professed opinions. Socrates by contrast appears here as he does in the Apology, a model of integrity: “I think it is better for my lyre to be out of tune,… and better for most men to disagree and contradict me, than that I, but one man, should be in contradiction and out of tune with myself.”

Because of his commitment to hold only reasonable beliefs, a true lover of wisdom like Socrates will best be able to rule himself consistently. And because his life and beliefs will hang together, he will also be especially suited to help his city, by ruling justly over others: “I think that I am one of the few Athenians, and I say few in order that I may not say only, who undertakes to practice the true art of politics.”

Gorgias is one of Plato’s greatest works, and also one of the longest. The only longer dialogues, the Republic and the Laws, are, like the Gorgias, centrally preoccupied with politics. Even in the years he spent teaching and writing in Athens, puzzling over the incorporeal nature of the soul and the proper way to grasp the Forms, the fate of the Greek polis remained an obsession with Plato: “He gave everyone the impression of greater concern for civic matters,” according to one ancient Life of Plato ascribed to Olympiodoros.

In the Republic, Plato implies that the soul should be understood by analogy with the city. Justice in a city depends on the form of its regime, and so it is with each soul. In the best city, he hypothesizes that the best men—those who know, the philosopher-kings who have become acquainted with the world of Forms—will rule over the soldiers and laborers who make up the rest of the population. Similarly, in the best soul, its best element—reason—will regulate its passions and bodily needs. Furthermore, Plato implies, the best soul is most likely to flourish in the best city, where the rule of the best men will reinforce the best element in the soul of each citizen. Like a wise monarch, the best soul will be clear, consistent, courageous, and unswerving in its dedication to the good. It will strive to know clearly its true bent, its special talents, its mettle—and therefore to acknowledge how it properly ought to fit into the political order of things.

In a democracy, by contrast, according to Plato, passions and bodily needs run riot. In such circumstances, and to ensure their own survival, the lovers of wisdom must create a community of their own—a group of philosophers not unlike the one Plato had assembled at the Academy. By living a cloistered life of contemplation and learning, a circle of friends might search for wisdom together, guided by the philosopher’s own example: If Plato’s students “could not govern a city, he wanted them at least to be able to govern their own selves.”

Plato himself remained largely disengaged from the political life of his native city, as if participating directly in the freest and most open society of his day were beneath the dignity of a true philosopher. In 366, according to Diogenes Laertius, Plato did come to the defense of Chabrias, an Athenian general who had been hauled before

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