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A Problem in the Gorgias: How Is Punishment Supposed to Help with Intellectual Error?*

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A Problem in the Gorgias: How Is Punishment Supposed to Help with Intellectual Error?* A PROBLEM IN THE GORGIAS: HOW IS PUNISHMENT SUPPOSED TO HELP WITH INTELLECTUAL ERROR?* Christopher Rowe 1. Background What has become the traditional Anglophone view of Plato’s writing divides it up into three periods: ‘early’, ‘middle’, and ‘late’. ‘Early’ usually means ‘Socratic’, i.e., closer to the thought of the historical Socrates; ‘middle’ tends to mean ‘including reference to a theory of ‘separated’ Forms’ (vel sim.); ‘late’ means anything after that. (The ‘late’ dialogues, on this traditional, Anglophone view, are a collection of dialogues that have rather little in common, except that the kind of philosophy they represent seems—to those who wish to see it that way—closer to what we moderns, or we modern Anglophones, call ‘philosophy’.)1 Nowadays, * The present paper, originally presented—in a rather less developed version—to an invited session of the XII Congreso Nacional de Filosofía, held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in November 2003, is or was the fi rst in a series of three papers on the Gorgias, all of them sharing a virtually identical fi rst section (‘Background’), and an overlapping second (‘The problem of the Gorgias’). The second paper in the series, ‘The Good and the Just in Plato’s Gorgias’, was originally presented to a colloquium held in Zagreb, Croatia in March 2004, and was published—a little prematurely—in Damir Barbaric (ed.), Platon über das Gute und die Gerechtigkeit (Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 2005, 73–92, and will appear in slightly revised form in a Festschrift for Jerry Santas edited by George Anagnostopoulos; the third, ‘The Moral Psychology of the Gorgias’ (from which below, in a Postscript, I borrow several paragraphs) was presented at the Seventh Symposium Platonicum of the International Plato Society, held in Würzburg, Germany in July 2004, and will be included in the Proceedings of the Symposium, edited by Michael Erler and Luc Brisson. The content of all three papers will, in modifi ed form, constitute a chapter in my forthcoming book, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing (Cambridge University Press). 1 For a recent restatement of this traditional view of the dialogues as dividing into early-(transitional)-middle-late, see Gail Fine, Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2003), n. 1 to Introduction. Fine refers back, for a defence of the traditional view, to Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY [also Cambridge University Press, Cambridge], 1991, chapters 2 and 3; but these two chapters are mostly concerned with a different proposal (‘that through a “Socrates” in Plato we can come to know the thought of the Socrates of history’: Vlastos, op. cit., p. 81), and presupposes the traditional division of Plato’s works rather than defending it. 20 christopher rowe however, this way of looking at the dialogues—let us call it the ‘devel- opmentalist’ view—looks distinctly less attractive than it once did, notwithstanding the support that it appears to derive from Aristotle’s reading of Plato, and the emphasis that reading gives to the point about the ‘separation’ of forms. The main reason for this is the recognition that the developmental model has nothing to support it apart from Aristotle—and a basic psychological plausibility: what more plausible, so the argument goes, and more natural, than to suppose that Plato started by reproducing, or exploring, what was essentially his master Socrates’ thinking, but then moved on, beyond Socrates (especially in metaphysics, if one takes Aristotle’s line)—and fi nally entered a period of mature refl ection, in which, perhaps, he abandoned some of the optimistic constructions of his ‘middle’ period?2 For if we take, just by itself, the evidence afforded by the measurement of Plato’s style,3 what we seem to fi nd is an early group which contains both the so- called ‘Socratic’ dialogues, i.e. dialogues untouched by ‘middle-period’ Form-theory, and three of the central dialogues that contain that very theory: Cratylus, Phaedo and Symposium.4 We may, of course, choose to 2 Such a picture of the evolution of Plato’s thought is likely to appear particularly appealing against the background of a general assumption that progress in philosophy is linear, and of the more particular assumption that Aristotle is a much more evolved specimen of a philosopher than his teacher Plato (and Plato than his teacher, Socrates). Fine’s book (2003) refl ects both assumptions, which are indeed endemic among British and American scholars. I myself regard such assumptions as at least unhelpful, to the extent that they interfere with our giving Plato, and Socrates, a decent hearing; and the present essay fi rmly rejects them. That is to say, I am not in the least inclined to treat the kinds of positions I shall attribute to the Socrates of the Gorgias (who is, in my present view, not so distantly related to the real Socrates) as quaint, or simply false. Part of the point of the present attempt to recover what this Socrates is saying is that in my view—which I share with my friend, colleague, and co-author Terry Penner—it stands a rather good chance of being true. 3 This is not to say that we must necessarily believe everything we are told by the stylometrists, whose track record—at least in more recent times—has not been uniformly good. However (a) at any rate some of their conclusions appear to be reasonably fi rm; and (b) in any case the traditional early-middle-late paradigm has generally been thought (mistakenly: see below) to be supported by those fi rmer conclusions. 4 See especially Kahn (1996) and (2003), 96: ‘At fi rst sight, the division into three stylistic groups [proposed by a number scholars working mainly in the nineteenth century] seems to confi rm [the] theory of Plato’s development [in question], since all of his ‘Socratic’ dialogues are fi rmly located in the earliest group. But this fi rst sight is misleading. The central group does not at all coincide with what are called the ‘middle’ dialogues, since the intermediate group defi ned stylistically includes both Parmenides and Theaetetus, which are generally counted as ‘late’ from a developmental point of view. On the other hand, the ‘early’ group includes Symposium, Phaedo, and Cratylus. A traditional developmentalist who recognizes that the stylistic division is chronological .
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