Today
Having having already reviewed the
dialogue and discussion between Socrates and
Gorgias, we move on to
The dialogue between Socrates and Polus and on Friday
we'll discuss the interaction with Callicles. And then when Socrates is
frustrated and creates a dialogue with himself.
So first of all about Polus.
Notice that in this section, we have an interruption of the discussion
between Socrates and
Gorgias so that conversation breaks down and Polus interrupts. And
this is an actual guy that we know something about, Polus. He's from Sicily from Acragas. And
he's said to be younger than Socrates.
But he's old enough to have composed a treatise on rhetoric that Socrates says he's read. And
from other sources, we know that that title may have been something like Word
Sanctuaries of the Muses or shrines of learned speech so very
rhetorical
title for a book on rhetoric and in another platonic
dialogue about rhetoric. So Plato wrote several dialogues about rhetoric, the Gorgias is
one of them. Another one is called the Phaedrus.
Socrates there describes
Polus so we think that he's an actual person.
He was a professional teacher of rhetoric and he was a student of Gorgias and probably other people as well.
Now the Greek word Polus literally means colt. And
Socrates, as well as others who mentioned in antiquity, make fun of his name as if he is somebody that has coltish impatience.
He's also represented as having inferior skills and manners within his teachers
so he interrupts Gorgias and he falls back on such weak and fallacious arguments as appealed a popular opinion and appeal to
fear.
Now whether or not the actual Polus was
that much of an asshole or not is not a question
we can answer because we don't have any of his works and we don't have any
descriptions of him except by his hostile critics like Plato.
But the way he's depicted in Plato as somebody that's concerned with
appearances and concerned with how he appears to other people and concern with conventional concepts of morality.
So he intervenes exactly at a point where Socrates has shown up an
inconsistency or a contradiction in Gorgias's argument. And at the end of class last time we discussed what that
contradiction is. And it comes down to the fact that Gorgias claims both that if a student uses the
rhetorical skill that Gorgias teaches unjustly then the student, as opposed to the teacher, is
unjust and is to blame.
But, on the other hand, if a student doesn't know anything about justice, then Gorgias will teach it to him.
And so the student will be just and so this creates a contradiction because Gorgias's
Students will both be just and unjust and that's incoherent.
But according to Polus, Gorgias wasn't really being serious or sincere
when he said if a student doesn't know about justice, then I would make sure he does before giving him these powerful
weapons of rhetoric.
Instead Polus says it was only out of shame or embarrassment
that Gorgias said that if a student doesn't know about justice then Gorgias would teach it to him.
Like if you asked me,
"Do you make sure that those students you're teaching know something about justice before you give them those powerful?
tools of writing and speaking?"
I would say, "sure I make sure that they know justice" because I wouldn't want to admit that I was teaching potentially
unjust people.
Now at
461b and following we can tell that
Polus, at least as he's being depicted by Plato, is very concerned about shame and appearances and becoming embarrassed and so forth and
And he believes that Gorgias said he would only teach Justice because he was ashamed not to say that. Not because he actually would do.
So Gorgias, in Poulos view, isn't
guilty of a contradiction, in fact he would teach just or unjust people how to use rhetoric. He just doesn't want to admit that.
So Poulos says,
who do you think would deny that he himself knows what's just and would teach it to others?
Everyone would say that at least nobody would admit
Oh
I don't I guess I don't know the difference between right and wrong
Or I guess I don't care if the students that I teach are just or unjust.
So Poulus is concerned with conforming to popular expectation and avoiding the shame and embarrassment of not doing so.
Now the issue arises whether rhetoric is
really an art or craft or skill and Greek (techne) or
whether it's just a knack or kind of routine an (empeiria) in Greek. And
Polus is apparently on the verge of giving a long rhetorical speech of the kind
he's learned how to give from Gorgias and
a speech that would apparently resolve the contradictions that come out in Gorgias's  speech and explain how
glorious and powerful rhetoric is without getting into these contradictions that Socrates led Gorgias into.
But Socrates says, I'm not gonna listen to your long-winded speech about it. Rather, let's do it this way.
I'll ask you some questions and
examine
whether you know what you're talking about and you give me the answers to those questions.
And we'll see if they can be refuted. And this is Socrates preferred method. Socrates prefers
examining students by midterm and final exams rather than using long writing assignments. Because with long writing
assignments students can go on and bullshit things and not cite their sources and
appear kind of linguistically competent. Then we have to give them partial credit and so forth.
But when we give exams, we really find out who did the reading and who and what they're talking about.
So Socrates wants to give this kind of immediate examination of
the student and that is the Socratic method of
, smiie nning examining and refuting somebody's ideas.
Now earlier in the dialogue polis already said two things that are pertinent to the examination that he's made. To undergo
the first was an assertion that
'empeiria', meaning experience familiarity routine or knack
breeds
art.
Techne, while inexperienced, merely breeds chance lucky or unlucky outcomes.
But Socrates argues that he doesn't think rhetoric is an art or a skill or a craft.
He thinks it's merely a routine or familiarity or
knack. And specifically one that
produces gratification and
pleasure. And
Polus says, oh well
isn't that a good thing? Isn't having a knack or a routine for producing gratification and pleasure -
Isn't that an admirable thing?
Aren't you then agreeing that rhetoric is a great thing since it gives us a routine or a or a method? A kind of
experience in how to produce
gratification and pleasure.
Now
Polus's claim that rhetoric is an admirable thing recalls
the second thing that Gorgias had said earlier in the dialogue in response to the question
"what is your art"? That is - what is this thing called rhetoric?
Polus had said Gorgias had said and now Polus repeats that
my art is the most
admirable of all the arts. So being admirable is a crucial part of their conception of what they're doing.
Now as Socrates pointed out, that's inadequate as an answer to the question. What is this art?
Because it merely gives a quality or specifies the value of the art while not giving any definition of what it actually does.
But Socrates has a conception of what this is and he says it's not actually an art.
It's not an art at all. Rhetoric is just a kind of knack or routine. So let's
distinguish between three sets of questions. A question that says what is in art?
What is a techne and is rhetoric one of them? A
second set of questions that says specifically; what is the art of rhetoric and what does it do or what can it achieve? And
a third set of questions that asks, how are we to evaluate the art of rhetoric?
And is it an admirable thing or a shameful thing?
Now Polus, in response to the question What is rhetoric?
gives an answer to the third question. At which point Socrates says, before we can answer the third question
we have to answer the second question. What is this art of rhetoric? What can it actually achieve?
So when Polus goes on to answer that question, then Socrates responds that actually we can't answer that until we answer the first question
answer the First question.
So we can't know what the art of rhetoric is or what it can do and achieve unless
we know whether it's an art and what an art actually
is.
So
Socrates is showing up how these masters of rhetoric and these masters of answering questions can't even keep straight the
order of priority of questions that need to be answered.
Now it's very insulting
I think to say that rhetoric is a
knack or a routine at least if you're someone who thinks that it's an art or a craft or a skill or even worse if
you're somebody who thinks it's a kind of science or a kind of knowledge or something like that.
To consider it or
call it just a knack and not an art or a craft is to say that it isn't really a skilled thing.
It's just a matter of routine.
Like I can give you a set of
step-by-step instructions or a checklist that you can carry out and then you would be able to execute that task. A
routine exactly is in a computer program or in a comedy routine or anything is just a set of
repeatable actions that performed in response to a given situation. And
it is attained by experience or familiarity with analogous or similar situations and actions. And
so a trained rhetorician,
at this point in time, and this is the way that we think the training worked, is that you would have
prepared or set speeches designed for different kinds of occasions.
Oh
if you're praising somebody you want a speech that essentially has
these features. If you want to blame someone something that has these features. If you want to argue that the are guilty say this. If you
want to argue they're innocent say
that.
If you want to encourage someone to do these actions, to say these kind of things. If you want to discourage them from doing these actions,
Say these other kinds of things. And you
actually give them sort of model speeches of each one of those. And then you say and when you when you find out who your
actual audience is, then adapt it to those.
You know, fill in the kind of
ad-lib thing so that you now replace these generic names with specific names of your actual client, or the
person you actually want to praise. But basically it's a set out thing that we can just hand over to you.
Now Socrates
criticizes rhetoric by characterizing it is that kind of thing. A kind of thing where you just
learn how to do these things by mechanical rote and it doesn't require
much
intelligence or
creativity. But he also further criticizes it by saying that it's specifically a routine or a knack for
producing gratification and pleasure.
Right? So he characterized it as
essentially being a knack for selecting a
good
speech and memorizing it that's already been designed to give to a given audience.
Again, sort of like a comedy routine if the comedian is really good then it looks like it's very original.
But that's because they've done it thousands and thousands of times and so they're capable of making it look like it's really fresh and original
but they've done it again and again and so they have a knack for
entertaining people and giving them pleasure.
Now this
definition gets replaced by an even more obscure one. So
Socrates begins to refer and offer a positive
account of what rhetoric is by making a distinction.
He says it's actually a knack, not just for producing gratification and pleasure, but for producing
flattery. And he says there's a lot of different arts that produce
flattery that make us feel good or give this give the appearance of something good when it's not actually good.
So he uses this term that we translate something like catering.
Although it can also be translated dessert. Making or baking or candy making or confectionary or something
which is a skill that allows one to produce the appearance of good food like food that really tastes good without it actually being
nutritious. Or, it's something you really want to eat. It has a lot of different flavors or it's very attractive
to eat but it's not actually very good for you. There's an art form of doing this.
I mean most of the people that produce junk food or advertisements for fast food do this.
They make it look like
this is what you want to eat and make it look like it's
good food without it actually being so. And he says rhetoric is kind of like that. It creates the appearance of good
speeches about topics like the just and unjust without
delivering the actual reality of it. Another
example of this is
Cosmetics, which he says doesn't actually make people beautiful
it just gives them the appearance of beauty without the reality of it. And he also throws in
sophistry which is the appearance of making good speeches about things like law and
order or even just about natural science and other things. Remember sophistry was one of the terms and the charges that came in
To describe the kind of activities going on in the Thinkery in
Aristophanes that you have these people
appearing like their wise men, but actually they're very foolish and
Ridiculous people.
So if
there's a general class of things
that tend to flatter us or give us the appearance of things without giving us the reality of them. And if
Rhetoric is one of them,
then that tells us what kind of thing or what class of thing rhetoric belongs to. But it doesn't yet
tell us what makes it a distinctive thing of that kind.
so Socrates further
specifies that rhetoric is an
"Image of a part of politics" that's at 463 d. And that's a very obscure.
expression and one that we have to unpack. And the
interlocutors are made to respond by saying what the hell do you mean by calling
Rhetoric an image of the of the part of politics? It's it's an obscure
thing to say.
So in order to explain this we have to develop an elaborate analogy between
different kinds of skills. So consider various kinds of skills.
For caring for the body so I'm just gonna talk about this
Column here. So
gymnastics and medicine are two different kinds of skills that cater to caring for the body and
Gymnastics is a kind of care for the body that preserves and enhances
the body. Makes it fit by taking the health that it already has and making it even
stronger and better.
Whereas medicine is a corrective or restorative care of the body in case there's disease or illness. Then
Medicine is a is a kind of art
skill or craft. A technique that comes in in order to restore or correct what's wrong in the body. And
Socrates compares that to an analogous
set of things that care for the soul, not the body.
What cares for the soul by preserving and enhancing it is legislation.
So we pass laws in order to take the
citizen body,
the
body politic as it were, and
make it good. Make it
better. Preserve its good parts. Enhance the parts of it that are good and
in case there's parts of the body politic or
rather of the soul of certain people that's actually bad or deficient in some way
then we use justice the justice system in order to correct or
restore the health of
the soul. And
so,
this is actually meant to be a division of politics that there's two dimensions to politics. One is legislation
that's the preservative and enhancing part that takes the souls of the citizens and
and keeps what's good in them and makes it even better. And
justice is the part that restores or corrects the deficiencies and
so justice is therefore analogous to medicine which
deals with the
illnesses or deficiencies of the body and legislation is analogous to gymnastics  since it preserves and enhances the
body.
Okay, so keep in mind that
analogy and now we expand the analogy considerably.
So again starting with this first column.
To repeat myself, care of the body. We have two kinds of arts skills or crafts associated with this gymnastics
which preserves or enhances the body and medicine which corrects or
restores it in case of deficiencies or illnesses. And
Socrates says there's two kinds of
flattery
knacks that correspond to those So
corresponding to gymnastics is something that creates an image of
preserving or enhancing the body and that's
cosmetics or plastic surgery or something that
doesn't actually
make anybody more beautiful, you know, like plastic surgery just make people look like they have plastic surgery.
But the cosmetics just give the appearance that somebody's beautiful without the
reality of it. And this catering or pastry making or baking or whatever
isn't like medicine which actually regulates diets and so forth
so as to improve health.
But it makes it seem like it's giving wholesome good food by making it taste good by making it appealing in other ways.
But
Cosmetics is to gymnastics as catering is to
medicine. That is these are
images or fake
versions of those
so-called arts that imitate actual arts
like gymnastics and medicine. Now if we move over to this column and so we're talking about the soul and
politics we also have our
legitimate skill and art of
legislation which again aims at preserving and enhancing the body
politic and justice,
which aims at correcting or restoring in case there's some injustice or deficiency there. But
corresponding to those there are also these fake knacks, these
imitative things that merely give us an image of that and the name of the thing that
imitates.
Legislation, the fake version of it is called sophistry and
now we arrive at our definition of rhetoric. Rhetoric is that knack or
routine which gives an image of being a corrective or restorative art
corresponding to justice without actually being it. And that is how
rhetoric is an
image of a part of politics. Part of politics because politics divides into legislation and
justice
and an image of a part of it because it's an image or a fake replica of that part of politics that deals with
justice.
So rhetoric is therefore, the scope of it is restricted here to talking about justice and
the kind of things that happens in courts. And rhetoric, you know is training lawyers to be able to get clients off or
prosecute them with indifference to what the actual truth is. That kind of skill is
called an image of a part of politics for that reason. Any questions about that?
That elaborate set of analogies and how he arrives at that
definition?
Ok good, now Polus says: well you're calling it a kind of flattery.
You seem to hold it in low regard
Socrates.
But I don't think that
Rhetoric should be held in low regard because rhetoricians have the greatest power in cities so they should be held in high regard
Rather,
high-powered attorneys are really powerful people in society
right?
So Socrates
responds by denying that rhetoricians
actually have great power in cities if by power we mean something that's good
for the one who has the power.
Now notice that Polus accepts Socrates
linkage of power and
self-interest. He points out that rhetoricians,  just like tyrants can have people put to death,
confiscate property,
banish or exile people from the city. Don't these examples show that they have great power in cities? You know
if a high-powered attorney comes after you  he can prosecute you with the death penalty and get you put to death or
make it so that all of your property is seized or that you're exiled and banished from the city. Seems like great power. right?
Socrates
responds by attempting to prove that rhetoricians and tyrants may do what seems fit to them
by banishing and confiscating and exiling and so forth.
But they still don't have power to do what they want to do. And if he can show that
then he would show that they in fact do not have great power.
So how does he show that? Well, I'll break the argument down for you into basically six
parts.
First part is we make a distinction between three different classes of things.
First of all good things. Things that we could all agree are good things like wisdom beauty wealth and health.
They're always good. They always produce good
consequences for the person who has them and we can distinguish those from bad things.
This is a pretty elementary lesson in ethics, but
ignorance, poverty, sickness -
those are always bad and always produce bad
consequences for the person that has them. We can distinguish these good things and bad things from neutral things or what we might call
Instrumental things things like walking, running, sailing, sticks, stones and so forth.
Sometimes those are good. Sometimes they're bad.
Sometimes it's good to walk. Sometimes it's bad to walk. Sometimes you should sail. Sometimes you shouldn't.
Sometimes you use sticks in order to save someone who's drowning in a pool,
sometimes they use it to bash an innocent person over the head. So it could be good or could be bad.
So things in this class are utilized either for good or bad, but are not in themselves
good or bad, they are neutral or
instrumental.
Okay, the second part of the argument. We observed that neutral things are always chosen for the sake of good things and not for
bad things we always want to bring about good things. That means things that are in our own
interest.
So we choose things in the neutral category because we want to achieve good things or avoid bad things.
We don't choose them for the sake of doing neutral things themselves.
People take medicine in order to get healthy, not just
so that they can take medicine and people work in order that they can make a living not just
because they love working or people show up to lectures in order that they can
pass the class or get a degree not just because they love showing up at lectures.
So
neutral things like showing up at lectures, taking pills,
working,
all fit into this neutral category and aren't themselves good or bad.
Now the next three steps I can go through pretty quickly.
Activities like banishing people from the city,
confiscating their property or putting them to death are neutral things. Hence, they're done for the sake of some good thing.
Those who do these things want to do them because they achieve something good - again -  good for themselves.
Nobody banishes just for the sake of banishing or confiscates property just for
confiscating property. You confiscate property because you think it'll be good because I'll have more property then and wealth is a good
thing, Or if I banish this person then they won't
challenge my power and my having power is a good thing or I put them to death because
they're a menace to society and I want to avoid that
evil being a problem.
Now if a tyrant or an orator
confiscates
someone or puts them to death or banishes them because he thinks that a good thing will result from that but in fact a bad
thing results from it,
then we'll say he does what he sees fit, but not what he actually wants to do.
This is again because everybody that employs
neutral or instrumental things wants them for the sake of good things not bad things.
But sometimes they end up actually producing bad things and if they do, he's done what he sees fit
but not what he actually wants to do.
Also,
throw in this premise and emphasize it. That by having power
I necessarily mean something good for the one who has power. So holding this argument to the strict
requirement that it showed that these good things are good for the agents themselves.
I'm not talking about some generic abstract sentence of good and the overall
universe or good
according to health philosophers talking about it. I mean very simply good in the agents own interest.
The final step is that if the rhetorician or tyrant achieves a bad thing by banishing or
confiscating or putting someone to death, then he's done something bad for himself and
he's not done what he wanted to do, but has done what he saw fit to do.
Therefore it's possible for rhetorician and tyrants to do things that they see fit and
yet not have real power which requires doing what they want to do.
So consequently Polus has claimed that rhetoricians
like tyrants wield great power in the cities by virtue of the fact that they can do whatever they want is
refuted by Socrates. That doesn't mean they can do whatever they want,
it just means they can do what they see fit but you haven't shown that them being able to do what they see fit is
what they want to do or is in their own interest.
That would take a further argument. Yeah, I
mean doing something that benefits them that's in their own interest. That's all I mean by doing good.
Ok, this would be a much weaker argument if all I had to show is that it is talking about good in an
abstract sense, but
this is these people banishing, exiling and so forth.
Socrates means to say, are doing things that's not in their own self-interest.
Not just that it's bad because we condemned things like
banishing innocent people or confiscating their property. There might be a sense in which that's just bad.
You know that we could argue that doing that is bad
morally
even if it's to the
benefit of the person. Like they get rich from doing it or something like this. But Socrates argument is that it's bad for that person
themselves or at least that Polus hasn't shown that it's good
for that person themselves. All he has been able to do is show that they're able to do these things.
But there's an assumption that being able to do things is good.
But it's like these examples, we keep coming up to that
you know mere power is not in itself good. Nuclear power might be good if it allows us to
solve the energy crisis or to have a form of energy that doesn't admit as much carbon and so forth and
can deal with climate but it could be bad if it gets in the hands of people who use it as a weapon
like the US did and so forth. So
merely saying they have the ability to do a bunch of neutral activities does not show what the argument is intended to show.
And that is Socrates point.
Now how does Polus respond? He says that Socrates'
position that it's possible for one who has power on the city to do as he sees fit but not
to do what he wants. He
replies that by saying that Socrates would envy somebody that had the ability to execute or banish people or seize their property
wouldn't you envy somebody that had that power in the city? And Socrates says well, do you mean
the day that I would have the power to do those things justly or unjustly? And Polus says it doesn't matter.
Wouldn't you be envied either way? In fact, it seems even more enviable to Polus if you can do it with indifference,
to justice or injustice,
that just shows you have more power. If
you only have power to do it justly that would be kind of a restriction on your power.
That's the point of being a tyrant is that you don't have to worry about stuff like that?
You get to do it no matter what. And
Socrates says no.
Whoever puts another to death unjustly is miserable and not powerful and it is to be pitied and not envied.
So, how does he show that?
Well, first of all compare a
ranking of four different things. Here's Polus's ranking.
It'd be really bad to be put to death
justly, like you did something wrong.
You murdered some innocent people and so a court found you were guilty and they executed you. A really bad thing to happen.
One of the worst things that can happen to you -
Maybe the worst thing.
Almost as bad is being put to death
unjustly. Presumably being put to death unjustly is better because at least you weren't unjust and didn't actually murder those people
It's still bad because you're dead. But at least at least you can hold on to the fact that you didn't do anything wrong.
Better than either of those, because you live, is putting other people to death
justly. I
mean pretty much we can all agree. That's a good thing. If it's just now, I don't happen to think that the death penalty's ever
just but we don't need to think about that issue.
We could replace putting to death with any form of punishment and the argument
would work out. So suppose that there are some people that it's just to put to death they're so
monstrous. They've done such horrendous crimes that death is actually justified.
Then putting them to death unjustly would be a good thing to do and
Polus thinks the best thing is if you could put people to death
unjustly. If you had so much power that you could you could put people to death whether they
deserved it or not because you're a super strong
tyrant.
Okay, and
Socrates flips this ranking and he says that actually putting people to death unjustly is the worst thing you can do. It is worse
even than being put to death
Justly, or being put to death
unjustly.
So the rankings actually agree except for the elements that I've put in green and red.
They agree on which things are better and worse except for they flip
whether it's a great power to put somebody to death unjustly or whether that's actually the worst thing you can do. Now
Polus: says oh okay, so you wouldn't want to be a tyrant then
right? And Socrates replies by giving him a thought experiment. The thought experiment as he puts it as the crowded marketplace
We could replace it with a school
shooter
example. Right? you all have the power, you could have just a gun in here and shoot us.
All right, you could have murdered us all and so put us all to death.
Every one of you has the power to do that.
There's almost nothing we could do to reply to it as so many instances show
isn't that a great power? You can put to death whoever you want and
Polus says: well that would be good. That wouldn't be nice.
But the problem is that - and their example is - somebody brings a knife into a crowded marketplace.
Yes, you could start attacking random people with a knife and put them to death,
but it's not such a great thing because you're likely to get caught
or killed and
so therefore it's not actually in your self-interest. That's not a great
power.
Right again. The action itself is neutral.
Stabbing people with knives or shooting them with guns, that could be good or could be bad.
But the power to do it itself is not a great or a good power until we find out if its
consequences are good or bad.
So since it's only when the outcome is good that the person who acts can be said to have real power,
someone only has real power if they act justly not unjustly.
So no,
you don't have a great power. The fact that you could have brought a gun in here and killed us all - that isn't
a great power. It doesn't benefit you. It's not a good thing.
It's not a power and people that do that are weak and miserable,
unjust.
horrible human beings.
But Polus actually rejects this and claims that ancient history has got ample
examples of people who acted unjustly and are a lot happier because they did so and
his example is Archelaus although you could replace it with practically any other
politicians in history.
But the example is meant to show that a person who would have been a slave because of treachery and murder of innocent people
usurps the throne and becomes a tyrant and is able to torture and put other people to death and enslave them and so forth. and
And Polus says:
isn't he better because he was unjust so that he became able to do that? And
Polus says:
everyone would agree that he's happier than if he had not been unjust.
Almost everyone
everyone or almost everyone would agree and
that leads to a digression which gets into
the fallacy of appealing to what everyone or most people would say. Which cuts no ice
whatsoever in a moral argument like this. Although I won't bother going through
the reasons for that.
So returning to the main line of argument. The next stage that's crucial is
to point out how Polus thinks
it's possible to be unjust
and happy as long as one doesn't get punished. And Socrates denies this holding instead that  "a
man
who is unjust is thoroughly miserable the more so if
he doesn't get his due punishment for the wrongdoing he commits, the less
so if he pays and receives what is due at the hands of both gods and men?
Now Polus supports his side by saying: but punishment is really painful and he describes getting
tortured and banished and punished and having your property confiscated and he commits another fallacy of reasoning that we call
appeal to fear. You must think this is a bad thing
because it's painful. So you must think punishment is bad because it's painful and nobody wants to undergo
pain.
But Socrates offers a
different rank-ordering that challenges Polus's assumptions. So
Polus thinks that it's more
miserable to be an unjust person who is punished than to be an unjust person who isn't punished. But Socrates argues
it's exactly opposite is more
miserable to be an unjust person who's not punished than to be an unjust person who is punished.
Now the key to the entire rest of the episode with Polus is the following
Concession that he makes. He thinks that suffering injustice is worse than doing injustice.
But he concedes the doing injustice is more shameful than suffering it. And remember, this is a manifestation of his character
kind of person who is concerned about shame and embarrassment and
conventional morality.
So while he thinks that the person who is unjust and is punished is
more miserable, he'll agree that that's less shameful
and
while he thinks that an
unjust person who isn't punished is less miserable because they didn't have the pain of being punished.
He agrees that it's more shameful and that of course fits with our
intuitions, even if you're the kind of person who thinks that it'd be great to be a murderer or a robber if you could get
away with it still it seems that you would agree
it's more shameful to be a murderer or a robber than to be murdered or to be robbed. And
furthermore, you think it's more shameful to be a robber who's not punished than it is to be a robber who is
punished that's much less
shameful. So
the shame and the good State come apart in
in Polus's account and this allows
Socrates to make a set of proofs of those
paradoxes that I pointed out to you last time. He's able to show why committing injustice is actually worse than suffering injustice
so he defines the admirable that predicates that,
Polus is so concerned with. Socrates says that the admirable means
that it either produces more pleasure or more benefit and the shameful produces more pain or more harm.
So if something is more shameful, it's either more painful or more harmful or both.
But if committing injustice is more shameful then
committing injustice is either more painful more harmful or both.
Now committing
injustice is not painful.
That's what we've just been through and why the appeal to fear doesn't work on that side of the argument
But since committing injustice is not painful by a process of elimination
it must be that its either more harmful than suffering injustice.
Thus it is less bad and less harmful to suffer injustice
than to commit injustice.
And
again, being punished is better or more good than not being punished by a similar argument.
Just punishment involves paying what is due if you're justly punished then you pay what's due and
there's a theory presented that your acted upon by being punished and
if something acts upon another thing then the thing that's acted upon
assumes the quality of the thing acting upon it. So if you've been punished justly,
then you justly pay what's due and so you do adjust an admirable thing
and so you are just. The person who is punished and does his time or
subjects himself to that punishment is for that very reason a
just person. Now Polus conceded that justice is more admirable than
injustice.
But if it's more admirable then it's either more pleasant or more beneficial or both.
Now clearly being punished is not more pleasurable than not being punished.
So by a process of elimination it must be that being punished is more beneficial.
Thus, whoever is punished is benefited by being punished and it is better to be punished than not to be punished
assuming you've done
something wrong. And
finally we can use this argument to show why injustice is actually the worst thing of all by
introducing a couple more principles here.
Socrates tries to make his claim that being punished is better than not being punished more plausible by
developing a theory of punishment that we call
rehabilitative theory or
rehabilitation. And a rehabilitative theory of punishment basically says that a person is improved by being punished.
The point of punishing them is to make them actually better.
One who pays what's due
gets rid of something bad in his soul and of bad things those in the soul are the worst.
And I can prove that easily by distinguishing between three kinds of bad things.
Bad things with respect to external things like wealth.
The bad thing would be poverty. With respect to the body, it would be something like illness or disease.
With respect to the soul its corruption or justice. Now
which of these is most shameful? Being poor is not more shameful than being corrupt or unjust and
being sick or
having a disease is not more shameful than being corrupt or unjust thus
injustice and corruption of the soul is the most shameful. And it follows from that since it's most shameful that it's either most
harmful, most painful or both.
Now injustice is not more painful than poverty or sickness of course
so by a process of elimination injustice must be more harmful.
Being the most harmful injustice then is the worst thing that there is
Socrates argues.
Now here's why committing injustice and not being punished is the worst thing of all.
Various kinds of bad things,
Socrates says, are remedied by certain crafts.
So you go to a banker or a financier to remedy the badness of poverty and you go to a doctor or a medical
practitioner in order to remedy the bad things of the body like disease or illness.
That's why we go to bankers and doctors.
Who do we go to in order to solve corruption and disease? We go to judges.
Socrates asks Polus directly
which of these crafts do you think is more admirable - banking, medicine or law? And of course he says law because he's a law student
who's just finished law school and learning how to argue in law courts.
So he says that must be the most
admirable one. It follows that it must be the most pleasurable or the most beneficial or both.
Now consider the case of people going to doctors in order to cure a disease often
the treatment is painful
but the long-term result is less pain, other benefits like longevity or
vitality or going to the dentist? Sometimes it's painful
but it's a lot less painful than having all of your teeth rot out.
So it is with going to judges. Sometimes the treatment or the punishment is painful, but they're being treated by the most admirable
agents in the most admirable way with respect to the most important things. A
person who doesn't undergo such treatment, on the other hand, keeps the shameful thing and the horrible
evils with respect to the most important thing his soul and in the most disgraceful way. So the person who tries to escape punishment,
because they're focused on the pain of it and not the benefit is like a patient who focuses on the pain of
dental surgery or of injections instead of the benefit of the
surgery or the drugs. And
thus since these tyrants like Archelaus are most unjust and they have such power that they're able to avoid all
punishment. They are in the worst possible state so they're the most miserable and the most harmful
human beings of all.
So the conclusion that Socrates draws from this it's really incredible, but he draws the conclusion
that rhetoric is completely useless
unless you're a bad person. So he applies these foregoing arguments to the value of rhetoric.
He says in courts,
Rhetoric can help you get off if you've committed an injustice.
That's the source of the tyrannical power that Polus considers so
impressive, but this result only
helps you in being harmed and becoming more miserable. Helping you avoid punishment makes you worse if you've really done
something wrong.
The only good use of rhetoric, Socrates says, would be if you used it to accuse and convict yourself if you did anything
unjust or if one of your friends or family did something wrong then you could use rhetoric in order to convince
judges and juries that they ought to punish you or your friends or your family to make sure that they get that
healthy and wholesome punishment that improves our souls. On
the other hand, if you have an enemy in
Court, someone that you hate, and they're about to be found guilty and punished
then rhetoric would be useful to help them get off and escape
punishment. And this way you could make your enemies
miserable and shameful people and hurt them by unjustly getting them off in court and using your rhetorical abilities to
to
make it so that they aren't found guilty.
That would be a kind of usefulness of rhetoric.
So rhetoric is useful just in case either you committed some injustice
and you need to ensure that you yourself get punished or your friends or family.
Or it would be useful if your enemy committed injustice
but you want to help him avoid punishment so that he doesn't become a better person.
The conclusion then is that for the person who doesn't have any intention of committing injustice rhetoric doesn't have any use whatsoever.
