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The Philosophy of Existence: Plato's Gorgias

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Eric Voegelin
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Extract

“War and battle” are the opening words of the Gorgias, and the declaration of war against the corrupt society is its content. Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, is in Athens as the guest of Callicles, an enlightened politician. It is a day of audience. Gorgias receives visitors and is ready to answer all questions addressed to him. Socrates, accompanied by his pupil Chaerephon, calls at Callicles' house in order to see the great man. The ultimate motif of the battle is not stated explicitly but indicated, as so frequently with Plato, through the form of the dialogue. Gorgias is somewhat exhausted by the stream of visitors and the hours of conversation, and he lets his follower Polus open the discussion; Socrates leaves the opening game to Chaerephon. The battle is engaged as a struggle for the soul of the younger generation. Who will form the future leaders of the polity: the rhetor who teaches the tricks of political success, or the mystic-philosopher who creates the substance in soul and society?

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1949 , pp. 477 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1949

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References

1 This study of the Gorgias is taken from the writer's History of Political Ideas to be published by the Macmillan Company of New York. It is a section of Part iii, Chapter 4.Google Scholar

2 A more detailed account of this scene would have to go into the homo-erotic implications. The reader should be aware that Socrates refers to philosophia as tà emà paidikà (482e).

3 The problem of a new philosophy of existence through the inversion of direction from the summum bonum towards nature recurs in periods of political disintegration.

8 The image of life as an entombment of the soul in the body recurs in other contexts. In Phaedrus 250c, for instance, Plato speaks of the souls in the state when they were still “pure and untombed” by the body.