PREVIEW-Episode 69: Plato on Rhetoric vs. Philosophy

0:00 Mark: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You can purchase the full episode individually or support the podcast. To get all of our episodes, review your options@priallyexaminedlife.com support. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 69 is something like maybe what's the relationship between philosophy and art? And we read Plato's dialogue, the Gorgias, from around 380 BC. You can join the discussion, get the text and read loads of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linton Meyer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:51 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:55 Mark: All right, so this is the year wrap up.

0:58 Seth: That's right.

0:59 Dylan: So Gorgias, it's a platonic dialogue with really four main characters. There's one other in there. You have Socrates, as usual. You have Gorgias, who's this older, esteemed orator, a guy who teaches people how to speak well and sort of argue in public meetings and actually has a kind of school where you go and you learn how to persuade people. His reputation is one that he'll teach you how to get out of anything, essentially, and how to persuade anybody of any opinion. He was actually a living, breathing human being, as is common in most of Plato's dialogues. And we have actually some examples of oratory that he supposedly penned himself. Polus is a younger guy who is fond of the public life and thinks that being able to persuade your way through public life and politics is important is both honorable and. And it's also for your own good. Callicles is this young upstart.

1:59 Mark: Actually, I read on Wikipedia that he's supposed to be an older rhetorician, but I don't know.

2:04 Dylan: Callicles.

2:05 Wes: Yeah, there's not much known about him. He's not mentioned anywhere else. But yeah, he's described as an older.

2:09 Dylan: Well, earlier here in Patagorges, he's described as younger. I read exactly the opposite. Let's leave it aside. Whether he's a young guy or an old guy, he doesn't try to make the argument necessarily that arguing well is noble. He makes an argument that's a little more radical, which says going for what's pleasurable is the best kind of life. And that's part of what oratory is, being able to argue for what you deserve and get all you can get and satisfy all your pleasures. So Socrates goes about this discussion his usual way and he tries to engage Gorgias and then Gorgias sort of gives up and he moves on to Polus. Polus sort of gives up and he moves on to Callicles, who gives up

2:50 Mark: himself for a little while, who gives

2:52 Dylan: up himself at one point. And Socrates has to argue with himself

2:56 Wes: for a while, which is remarkably similar to him arguing with another person. Indeed.

3:01 Dylan: Indeed. The underlying themes are at the beginning, the question of what are you teaching when you teach oratory and rhetoric? There's this theme of teaching and what is teachable. There's this theme of what is just and unjust and what is the best role for a human being. And underlying this, of course, typical in Platonic dialogues is what does it mean to live well?

3:22 Mark: Yeah. And the reason I gave the question to start, what is the relationship between philosophy and art? Because that is the way that I've heard this spun. You know, that you could use this as a first reading in an aesthetics class, that even though it's about rhetoric in particular, which not even clear that that's one of the arts, it's very clear as it progresses that he's talking not only about the art of persuasion, what lawyers do specifically say, but any kind of performance that is just for the enjoyment of people. And he uses examples like flute playing and even pastry baking.

Not that we consider that necessarily one of the arts, but this is certainly applied to all of poetry. The dichotomy is between philosophy that is about speaking truth and about getting at the good life and teaching virtue, and these other things which are about pleasing people. These people who if they themselves are already corrupt, then what pleases them is probably going to be something equally corrupt. And if you make it your art to be pleasing people in whatever form, then unless they're already virtuous, then you're not going to be giving them what they really need, which is to be made into better people.

They need to be given the straight, hard truth. They need to be given things that will make them virtuous.

4:32 Dylan: It's not that the good things are not pleasurable, they might not be always, but he's making the argument that pastry baking and flute playing is mere flattery because it appeals only to please for pleasing's sake, not please for the sake of the good.

4:48 Mark: Yes, in fact, if people are clear eyed, like there's not a lot in a way that's new in this dialogue over and above the other Platonic dialogues that we've done on this podcast, but one of the Things besides the treatment of rhetoric, which is the most famous part, I think. But that's really only the first, you know, explicitly about rhetoric. It's only the first, like fourth third of the dialogue, then it gets more generally about virtue. So he puts more straightforwardly in this dialogue than in the Republic or other places that we've read this theory of virtue, that people, when they are clear headed, will always seek the good.

And it's just that if we are already corrupt, having illusions is in fact a form of corruption, right? Lack of knowledge is a form of corruption. Knowledge is good. Having bad knowledge, having a bad self conception, having improper assessment of what is a really good thing, right? Confusing it with surface level, base, immediate pleasures, say, is something that will confuse you and thereby make you not pursue the correct direction. But if you were truly enlightened, then you would go the right direction. You would either be virtuous already or if you were lacking, then you would move to correct yourself, right?

Nobody willingly does something that they think is evil.

5:56 Wes: So maybe, yeah, we're jumping around a lot, aren't we?

5:59 Mark: We're getting at what this is the theme, okay, so now the theme is stated, unless somebody has something to add to that.

6:04 Wes: I mean, it begins with this question, what is oratory? And this was widely regarded in ancient Greece to be the sort of key to the universe, to success, let's say learning how to be a good speaker, persuader, you could get what you want. And I think it's Paulus who's very up on that idea, giving examples of, you know, if a doctor and an orator, you know, an orator could basically make himself seem more competent than a doctor, even though he's not. We begin with this idea, this crucial distinction, as you pointed out, Mark, between things that rely on knowledge and that convey truth and things that don't.

Socrates starts out with this discussion with Gorgias, and by the time we get to, to the end of that, we get this idea that oratory is a way of seeming to be more competent at any given subject than you actually are. And so you're using speech not to teach people, but to persuade them. And that even if you don't know anything, well, especially because you don't know anything, you'll be more persuasive with people who don't know anything. So that's the first section. And then really we get two other sections, right? The one with polus and then the one with callicles.

And the polus is where we get this talk about. Socrates makes the controversial claim that it's better to be the victim of injustice than the perpetrator of injustice. And we can get into discussion of that which seems completely absurd to Paulus. And the reason why it's relevant is because he's trying to show that oratory is not, in fact, this great power to use oratory to get what you want isn't actually going to be a good thing for you. So that sort of serves that larger argument. And then this third section with callicles, we get a lot of different things, but ultimately we end up back at this idea that it's not pleasure that's the criterion of the good, but health.

It can be health of the soul, health of the body. So we get this comparison between medicine and gymnastics, or this contrast between that and oratory, but we'll talk about that in more detail. But the idea in the end is that oratory is not an art that you use to make things more organized and better and more healthy or to help human beings be better, but that it's this knack that, as you've pointed out, Mark, is for the sake of giving people pleasure. So that's my summary.

8:17 Mark: What'd you think, Seth?

8:18 Seth: Anything to add from a summary perspective? No.

8:21 Mark: Well, how about from an initial response perspective?

8:24 Seth: It's funny, we've had this conversation before, but since it's been a while since we talked about a Platonic dialogue, we famously, in the very first episode we ever did of this podcast, talked about kind of how Socrates is an asshole. And there's always this tension when you don't know Greek and you're not as well versed in a lot of the conceptual and cultural norms that when you're reading through this, you're thinking, are they really going to let that go? Is he really going to get away with saying that? And you keep catching yourself and saying, maybe there's something underneath this that I don't understand that makes that a non controversial statement.

And maybe I just haven't read a dialogue in a little while. But this one particularly got to me, especially in the section on rhetoric where I just kept having to pause and say, really? You're just going to let that thesis stand? Gorgias, like really, really, it's okay. You're just going to let that go? Socrates makes a number of, I don't want to say outrageous claims, but certainly things that would be disputable in this day and age. And I'll be curious if we get into it to push on Wes and Dylan, who I know know a lot more about this stuff than me to find out if there is something controversial in what was being.

If there were something understood that I don't understand about some of the claims he's making and some of the argumentative moves that he makes.

9:43 Mark: Well, can we drill into the text in this first section? Do you have a particular spot that you want us to start on?

9:49 Seth: There's a section where. Let's just start with the difference between instruction and persuasion.

9:56 Dylan: Do you have a line number?

9:58 Seth: Maybe. I don't know. I don't know if the Kindle.

10:00 Dylan: Did it come with those stuff in his line numbers?

10:03 Wes: Are we all using the same translation, by the way? Because when you say instruction, the Kindle

10:09 Seth: version I have is the jowl translation. I also have the Internet version that you guys used. Cooper. Yeah. Okay, give me a second to cross

10:17 Dylan: reference here while he's looking. Not to be nitpicky, but the couple places I've just looked. Callicles is said to be a young guy.

10:26 Mark: Is it Socrates calling him a young guy because he's 45 and Socrates is 50?

10:32 Dylan: I'll point to the quote on 5:15a. Socrates says, since you are yourself now just beginning to do the city's business and urge me to report. And it goes on.

10:44 Mark: Yeah, I saw that.

10:46 Dylan: In both translations that I read in the beginning commentary, he's referred to as a young guy in the Cooper and in the Nichols that I have. And also in a third translation I looked at then.

11:00 Mark: Wikipedia lies.

11:02 Dylan: That would not be the first time.

11:04 Wes: Where is this? This is 5:15.

11:05 Dylan: What a.

11:07 Wes: By now, my most excellent fellow. Is that where it's in your translation. He calls him young fellow in Cooper.

11:13 Dylan: My most excellent fellow. Seeing yourself are now just beginning to be engaged in the business of the city.

11:18 Mark: So that doesn't mean that he's young. That means he's just started to do that. That doesn't.

11:22 Dylan: I understand from a strictly logical point of view, but in Greek life that's what you would have been doing if you were part of the upper class. You start arguing your pants off early in your life.

11:34 Mark: We do know that this is his house.

11:36 Dylan: It's his father's house.

11:37 Mark: Oh, it is, yes.

11:39 Wes: The crucial thing that happens in this first section is nailing down the definition of oratory. And it gets a little worrisome early on because it begins to look like it's going to be one of these tedious definition fests, which luckily it doesn't turn out to be. Socrates is known for. But you know, in the end we get Gorgias trying to say first he sings its praises and says it's the source of freedom for humankind and the source of rule over one city and things like that. Ultimately, Socrates will force Gorgias to admit that. Well, I don't know if Gorgias really admits it, but this idea that oratory is to.

I'm reminded of people saying, oh, I want to be a writer. But then that's such a really vague thing. Like Socrates points out, anyone is really an orator or speaker or persuader when you think about it. Anyone who has a craft, like making shoes or something, if they're teaching their craft to someone, then they're a persuader, but they actually have knowledge to pass on. Just to say you're an orator without that being anchored in some actual craft is kind of a vague thing. So then Gorgias is forced to say, well, it's. This is all about political gatherings or law courts and things like that.

And then we get into this question of knowledge, and this is kind of the critical thing in the first section, whether oratory is something that is going to actually provide people with knowledge.

13:00 Dylan: And what kind of craft is an orator, a craftsman of? Like, what is an orator knowledgeable of? Such that they are both good at it and can teach it.

13:09 Wes: Right, right.

13:10 Mark: And if they're good statesmen, that would mean, for Socrates at least, that they would also have to be knowledgeable about the human soul, because that's just the relationship between the individual citizen and the good of the state. Those are one in the same, or at least very closely related bodies of knowledge. So Gorgias has to claim at first that since the orator is obviously not an expert in shoemaking or these other things or being a doctor, that he must be an expert in statecraft, in

13:39 Wes: virtue, or in the just and the unjust, to put it as it's translated.

13:45 Seth: Okay, I don't have a specific textual reference, but we are talking about the same place. So, Wes, before the section on knowledge that you're speaking of, Socrates makes a nifty little move where he says to Gorgias, do you think that knowledge and belief are the same thing? And Gorgias says, of course not. And Socrates says, well, one good evidence of that is we believe there's true and false belief, but there's no such thing as false knowledge, so there can only be true knowledge. So whatever knowledge and belief are, they're two separate things.

So, yeah, of course. And from that point on, there's this association between the ability to, in essence, if you're somebody who does something and you can instruct people in it, then you know it. Right. And that there's this association between instruction and knowledge. So let's leave aside the fact that somebody who's good at something isn't always necessarily the best teacher of a thing. Right? Because Socrates is assuming that anybody who's an expert shoemaker would be able to instruct somebody else in the craft. And that's clearly not the case.

We know there are plenty of people that can do things that can't explain or instruct. But at that point he goes into. So the art of persuasion is about belief, not about knowledge. Right? Because persuasion is not intended to instruct, it's intended to persuade people to your opinion or to your belief, essentially. And Gorgias says, yes. And then that gets into the whole value judgment around belief versus knowledge. And I think there's a legitimate move on Gorgias part that he didn't take where he could say, well, of course we're trying to persuade and not instruct.

And since we're not trying to instruct, I don't need to know all about a thing, I don't need to be able to explain a thing. All I need is to get the person to whom I'm addressing myself to believe one specific thing. Belief is about. Is this right or wrong? Is this true or false? Some kind of belief? And by whatever argumentation I get that person to believe what I want them to believe, then that is the art of persuasion. And whether it's a true or false belief is irrelevant. But that's what the craft of oratory is. Completely divorce it from this positive negative association over against knowledge.

16:06 Wes: This, by the way, begins around 454, 454C and D. In D we get

16:12 Seth: the conviction stuff, 454E he says, Would you like us then to posit two types of persuasion? One providing conviction without knowledge, the other providing knowledge. And Gorgias says, yes, I would. And I would just say, no, persuasion has nothing to do with knowledge. I don't want to provide knowledge. That's not what this is about.

16:30 Wes: To be right here. All he has to be right about is that teaching is a form of persuasion, which I think is a legitimate way to categorize teaching. And then to say that oratory is another form of persuasion, teaching provides knowledge, oratory doesn't. I don't see that as a legitimate distinction. I mean, you may want to say, well, oratory doesn't need to provide knowledge, and so on and so forth. But this distinction here, I'm not sure, rests on that.

16:53 Dylan: I don't think it's good enough to say that there are plenty of people who can do a craft who can't teach it. In saying that you don't need to know a craft in order to teach it.

17:03 Seth: No, no, no, I agree with that.

17:05 Dylan: Okay, so it seems to me that Socrates has taken the harder case, which is he's not claiming that everybody who can do a craft can teach it. He's saying that in order to teach it, you must know it. Now, that, actually, I think, is an interesting thing worth arguing about too, if you think about even just a kind of simple example of a great coach. It's not necessarily the case that a great coach who helps a basketball player become a great basketball player is a great basketball player, him or herself. And you might not be a great violin player, but be able to teach a violinist.

To become a great violin player, you're obviously going to have to have some knowledge of violin playing, what it is exactly that you're teaching or doing that helps them become a great violin player. It's not clear what it means to say that that's a craft of teaching. Exactly. Or what it is that the craft of teaching is doing. And I think that something like that is going on for Socrates with the question of rhetoric, especially with respect to persuasion, that rhetoric is running into the same kind of problem that teaching does itself, that it's problematic to talk about the expertise of teaching as teaching.

It becomes to be empty of the forsake of which, like, if a good coach is going to be good at making somebody better at basketball. And so in the case with rhetoric, he would say that, well, if you're an expert at rhetoric, you're going to be an expert at persuasion, even in the case of persuasion for persuasion's sake. And Socrates wants to call foul on that case at the end and say, well, persuasion for persuasion's sake is mere flattery. And that case of the argument goes on later where he takes up the problem or the instance of teaching persuasion for persuasion's sake.

And then there's this other part, persuading without knowledge. So I think he ends up taking on them both that you have to either be knowledgeable or you end up being a mere flatterer.

18:55 Wes: Yeah, in this case, early on, before we get to the knack and the flattery stuff, which is with Paulus right now, he's just trying to say that oratory is not a type of teaching. And he wants to do that because he's basically setting Gorgias up. He wants to say, an orator is not a teacher of law courts and other gatherings about things that are just and unjust. Then he gets into this thing. Well, and here's where you might say, I think, Seth, you might criticize his move at 4:55 B. He talks about. About a city holding a meeting and appointing doctors or shipbuilders or craftsmen to give advice.

And then he says, okay, and so the orator is going to be one of our advisors, and what is he going to give advice about? If you get advice from a doctor, shipbuilder, they have an area of knowledge, they give you advice. But the orator, we've just said, doesn't have that. So what is he doing there? What is his function? What is his role in that situation? You could say Gorgias might say, well, he's not an advisor. Or you might say, well, he's a lobbyist, he's a hired gun. Someone else has done the policy work and they just bring me in to close the deal.

Right. I'm not a policymaker. There have to be. You know, this is the kind of argument I think that you might make in this. You might want to say, well, you know, there are policymakers, but what I do is persuade. And I don't need to be a policymaker. Someone else does that.

20:15 Seth: That's exactly the argument I would make. The coach can teach the players how to play basketball, but unless the coach is also simultaneously a great rhetorician or an. He might not be able to convince them, to give them the belief that they can win a game. Just like you say, Wes, you can draft a great piece of legislation, but it takes powers of persuasion to convince people to vote for it. And those are two separate things. I wanted Gorgias to kind of stand up more and defend that as a legitimate undertaking. Yeah.

20:44 Wes: If you're a better orator, maybe he would have.

20:47 Mark: You're giving me visions of data from Star Trek as a coach going, there is a 48% chance that you will win today.

20:53 Seth: Go.

20:54 Wes: But then he delegates the inspirational role to the quarterback, which is often what's done. Right. You see the quarterbacks playing these very inspirational roles where the coaches seem to have just zero charisma.

21:05 Seth: Well, and it's true, right? It's a standard, tried and true thing to bring in an inspirational speaker, an orator, a rhetorician, to energize a team, a group, an organization, a bunch of, you know, salespeople, whatever it is. Somebody comes on and says, okay, here's what we're going to go do. And then they bring on somebody else to inspire them to greatness, to point

21:27 Mark: to the van, the van down by the river. That's right, you're going to live in.

21:31 Wes: I think the response here though is Gorgias is the one who sort of falls into the trap. After Socrates says, what can rhetoric really accomplish? Then Gorgias says, if an orator and a doctor came to any city and had to compete, the doctor wouldn't make any showing at all and the orator would kick his ass and blah, blah, blah. And that's where you get the danger of this type of, say, division of labor between a rhetorician and a policymaker or this kind of guy who can just be a mercenary or a hired gun. And what Gorgias is endorsing here is that someone pretend to know about something they don't really know about. And that one could argue is fraught with danger.

22:05 Dylan: I think that the scenario that was presented of having a hired gun come in, that Socrates, from his position, he wouldn't deny that that person's effective and persuasive, but he would say that it's just mere flattery, that that person is pleasing somebody and persuading somebody. And so the claim is made, well, that's fine. We can just disjunct that from what they're persuading them about. And Socrates doesn't want to do that. He would say, well, if it's the case that the orator comes in and persuades you to something that isn't for your health, when the doctor who knows your health can't persuade you and you end up listening to the orator just because of that, then that seems to be corrupt. You should be listening to the doctor. And the fact that the doctor can't persuade you doesn't mean that the doctor isn't telling the truth from a point of knowledge. That's what Socrates point is.

22:54 Seth: But who cares about that?

22:55 Dylan: Well, Socrates cares about that because. And anybody who wants to be healthy would want to care about that, right? I mean, this is the whole thing about advertising, right? You know, you have the advertising people cigarettes, right? How great cigarettes are, how glamorous they are. Oh, no, they don't cause you any ill effects. In fact, you could even start lying about it and saying, actually, you know, cigarettes are good for you. You know, have a couple cigarettes in the morning every day, jump start your day, get a little nicotine high, go along like that. And the whole time they're lying about it. The American Red Cross can't conv you in this because they lack the persuasive ability. And in the end, hundreds of thousands of people end up dying of lung cancer because of the ability to persuade. That's the direction we're talking about.

23:34 Seth: You started off with the example the doctor tells you to do something and you don't want to do it. The doctor is not persuasive, and so somebody else comes in and persuades you to do it. The goal is to get you to do what the doctor wants you to do, because the doctor acts from a position of knowledge. And in this case you're in the wrong. You're the idiot, you're the one not listening to the person with knowledge, and the one who doesn't have knowledge comes in persuasive, persuades you.

23:57 Dylan: So I think that Socrates point is not that persuasion isn't possible, it's that it has to be persuasion guided properly. And his argument is very, very similar here to the one that he makes regarding music and poetry in the Republic. It's not that it isn't good to have persuasive things, it's that they have to be guided correctly. That persuasion for persuasion's sake is mere flattery. That's his argument, that it's just gratifying one's pleasures, and gratifying your pleasures is not satisfactory.

24:26 Wes: This argument, though, that he's making here, before we get to the gratification stuff, comes right after this. But this kind of stands on its own as a separate argument against oratory, because he's pointing to the danger of. And Gorgias admits this. He says, well, there can be orators who use their powers for evil and that should be avoided. Although Socrates has a later argument against the possibility of that. But the danger here is that the non knower will be more persuasive than the knower among non knowers, right? Socrates's point is that the masses don't really know.

And if your orator himself doesn't really know and is relying on others secondhand, the people who are more ignorant will be more persuasive. So the wise man from this standpoint is in a lesser position. So that's a dangerous situation. There's a systemic thing here where what's naturally going to seem more persuasive is actually more bullshitty. It's not like persuasion and knowledge can neatly line up. There's a tendency for them to go against each other. I think that's. It's an even stronger claim than the one we've been making. And then there's a final argument in this section which also stands on its own, which is that the orator isn't just going about doing oratory, he's also a teacher of oratory.

I mean, Gorgias claim to fame is to teach people how to be great orators. So the orator can't escape the position of being a teacher. He can't say, oh no, I'm not a teacher. He is a teacher. He's teaching other people oratory. And then Socrates question is, well, can you really teach people how to speak about the just and the unjust if you know nothing about it? Now maybe we could make an argument that he can, but Gorgias says, well, no, I can't. And then Socrates sorts of traps him by saying that, well, if you know about justice and injustice, then you must be just.

And so oratory can actually be used unjustly. It's kind of a little side refutation, but I think those are important points. The orator can't escape being in the position of the teacher and that persuasion and knowledge, actually there's this conflict between them. It's not like they can just line up fortuitously or not line up fortuitously.

26:23 Dylan: And part of it is that Socrates wants to say that those who persuade hold responsibility for what they persuade for. So I forget which point it is if it's in this section or if it's in the later section with Gorgias. Socrates hems Gorgias in when Gorgias wants to say that he teaches about justice and persuasion with respect to justice, but does not take responsibility for the unjust acts of those he teaches. So on the one hand, he wants to distance himself from what people do in the name of his teaching, and yet claim that he's teaching something about justice. And that's another tack of the argument with regard to persuasion. That persuasion for persuasion's sake then severs itself from the very thing that it's persuading about. It takes no responsibility for it.

27:14 Mark: That is exactly the point that we're talking about what you're referring to. And that's how we get out of this section into the polis section, which is that he catches Gorgias contradicting himself that he said, what is this subject of this? If you're a shoemaker, you'd be. The subject of your oratory would be shoes. Oh, well, since this is all about instructing people in matters of government, it must be about statecraft, it must be about justice ultimately. Oh, so you guys all know about justice? Oh, yep, we know all about justice. So that would mean that all of your orders would do just things, right? Oh, yeah, but you already said that some of them use it for evil. Oh, I guess I did say that. So I guess you're not teaching that. Yeah.

27:50 Wes: And then Paulus calls him rude.

27:52 Mark: Yeah. Yes. Yes.

27:55 Dylan: Can we back up for a second? I'm wondering more about what Seth thinks about this disjunction. It's certainly true what you were saying, that you can have people who are good at persuasions for persuasion's sake. You disjunct the policy from the act of persuasion. So, Seth, you seem to not think much of the argument that they ought not be separated.

28:17 Seth: So I guess what I'm feeling is that, and without being able to articulate it 100%, is something along the lines of what makes oratory good or bad is the service in which it's employed. So if you use oratory without knowledge to convince somebody to do something that's against what somebody with knowledge would recommend, for example, then it's bad. But if you use it in the service of convincing somebody to do something that they should be doing because it's backed by knowledge, then it's good. And so if what Socrates is doing here is saying, well, the employment of oratory in the fashion of the first example, where it's bad is what I'm talking about, and that's flattery or that's whatever derogatory term he uses, then it feels to me like Socrates is making more of a claim about how it's employed as a tool than about oratory itself.

And by the way, I'm totally not convinced by all of his analogies to cooking and, you know, the cook versus the doctor or whatever that like that, that's another thing that just kind of got to me.

29:33 Dylan: But you and Callicles, right? What is this about cooks and doctors and what the hell?

29:39 Seth: No more make it sound like cooks would create something savory and tasty where the doctor would want you to, you know, to eat something terrible, and that you would, of course, choose the savory and tasty instead of the terrible medicine, because all medicines are bad, but the cook might know more about nutrition than the doctor. Certainly is the case in this day and age. So that's the part where I'm kind of like, is there an error being made here where he's attacking the profession of rhetorician or order? And he does make a distinction a little bit later on, although I can't sustain it in this discussion right now that or is he complaining about the way it's being used? And if it's all about complaining about the way it's being used, then all of this discussion about what is the end of this activity and all that seems to me to be beside the point.

30:29 Mark: Wasn't it kind of both, I'm thinking in the Republic, his comments about flute playing and things that he seems to think, okay, yeah, there's a time and a place for this, but given what flute playing is for, which is for soothing people and kind of putting them in this ultimately undesirable emotional state or not completely virtuous, or that there's a time and place for it, but nobody who's really self respecting would want to do that. So the context of this is that he's talking to these people that esteem rhetoric as being the greatest of crafts and he wants to knock it down and put it in its place to

31:02 Wes: make this claim go through. I think Socrates will have to maintain that you can't really be a good orator without knowing what you're talking about. I think that's the a good as

31:12 Mark: in a virtuous or a good as an effective?

31:13 Wes: Effective. You can't be effective without knowing what you're talking about. There's not that disjunction. You can't be effective in the sense of, yeah, producing genuinely good results for the city. You can't do good with oratory unless you know what you're talking about. It's not good enough to have like the perfect imaginary policymaker who knows everything and is giving you the perfect things to advocate for, to hand that over to you. Because to really speak about those things effectively, Socrates might say, you have to know them. You have to know them in depth. You can't just be a messenger for those things.

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