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It’s hard to say exactly which of Plato’s dialogues is the most relevant to the modern reader, but I think Gorgias would be a major contender. This Platonic dialogue takes place between Socrates and a small group of sophists as well as some other guests at a dinner party. What starts off as a defining of what rhetoric is and what its purpose is turns into a philosophical discourse on the Socratic view of natural morality, absolute truth, and self-control as opposed to relative morality, relative truth, and the pursuit of pleasure and excess as the ultimate good as held by the Sophists.

Socrates begins by comparing the techne versus what he calls a knack in rhetoric. He uses the example of medicine versus cookery to demonstrate this idea. The doctor uses pleasant and unpleasant means to bring about health in a person. Surgery is generally unpleasant and painful but brings about health. It is not about the gratification of one’s desires, but rather about one’s health. The Baker on the other hand makes cakes and sweet breads to fulfill personal gratification and desire, but does nothing for the health of the person. Socrates in this Dialogue is the doctor. He is the true politician and philosopher who is ready to use both pleasant and unpleasant means to bring about a healthy soul.

Socrates denies that pleasure can be equated directly to good. He argues that this is demonstrated by the natural world. There are good and pleasant things that can kill us, and there are unpleasant and painful things that can save our lives. In saying so Socrates is claiming that there is a natural morality at play here. That when something is good and pleasurable there is a point when that good and pleasurable thing reaches an excessive point where it becomes bad or harmful. A little bit of alcohol once in a while for example, gladdens the heart and is pleasurable to the body, but the excess of alcohol intake leads to alcoholism and destroys our body, life, and soul. A little bit of sugar here and there is good and pleasurable for the body, but excess causes obesity and disease. Socrates says that the one who places pleasure and desire as the end all goal is harming his own soul and other souls around him. He likens the person to a man with a bucket that has holes in it. That the more the man fills the bucket the more he becomes a slave to keeping it full, and the more he fills it the more holes appear and the faster he has to fill it. This is like the soul of the carnal or hedonistic man.

These two views battling it out here in this seemingly inconspicuous platonic dialogue have massive philosophical implications in the real world. Especially in the political sphere. In many ways this argument has echoed through the ages and continues to be an argument of great importance to anyone and everyone whether they know which side of it they’re on or not. It portrays two views of freedom. One, being freedom as liberty, and the other freedom as autonomy. The sophist view is that of freedom as liberty, that any restriction whatsoever on a person creates repression and unhappiness because true happiness is found in the accumulation and satiation of desires, (this view is represented by many thinkers responsible for the modern mentality in the west, Freud, Nietzsche, etc.) and the Socratic view of freedom as autonomy that argues that true freedom is man’s ability to know restraint and govern himself based on man’s ability to reason and seek virtue.

It portrays two views of truth and ethics. That of the sophist’s relative idea of truth and morality. That you can make an argument for anything by appealing to human emotion and desire. That you can persuade people to whichever view you want as a rhetorician because no view has actual truth. All truth is only perspective. Or the Socratic view of a truth that is true apart from rhetoric, and a moral law that can be found in nature by use of man’s ability to reason.

Plato’s dialogue asks us to consider then, which side of this argument are we on?
Will we take the side of Socrates and pursue knowledge and virtue?
Or will we take the side of the Sophists and pursue the accumulation and satiation of our personal desires?