Socrates's Great Speech
Forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy Penultimate draft prior to publication Socrates’s Great Speech: The Defense of Philosophy in Plato’s Gorgias Tushar Irani Abstract: This paper focuses on a neglected portion of Plato’s Gorgias from 506c to 513d during Socrates’s discussion with Callicles. I claim that Callicles adopts the view that virtue lies in self- preservation in this part of the dialogue. Such a position allows him to assert the value of rhetoric in civic life by appealing not to the goodness of acting unjustly with impunity, but to the badness of suffering unjustly without remedy. On this view, the benefits of the life of rhetoric depend on the idea that virtue consists in the power to protect oneself from the predations of others. I argue that by challenging this understanding of virtue as self-preservation, Socrates both deprives Callicles of any remaining justification for the rhetorical life in the Gorgias and, at the same time, makes room for his own defense of the life of philosophy. Keywords: Plato, Gorgias, Socrates, Callicles, philosophy, rhetoric, virtue, the good life, hedonism, self–preservation 1. Introduction My title alludes of course to Callicles’s “great speech” at 482c–486d in the Gorgias.1 That speech, at the heart of the dialogue and almost four Stephanus pages in length, falls into two parts: first, Callicles offers an analysis of what is just by nature in contrast to what is just by mere convention; then, he issues a long diatribe against Socrates and the life of philosophy. The 1 The term “great speech” is commonly used by scholars to refer to the substantial length of Callicles’s speech, rather than to its qualitative merits.
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