Abstract
This chapter presents an, arguably, unconventional reading of Plato’s famous dialogue Gorgias. The claim is that the dialogue illustrates, or animates, how questions of truth and meaning are tied to ethics by showing that the grammar of our language is inescapably informed by desire, and that desire, in turn, is essentially informed by a desire for a ‘naked’ encounter with another naked soul. The chapter thereby suggests resources for an answer to the deadlock in the Cartesian universe. Akin to the unconscious truth of the excess of Descartes’ first principle, the chapter identifies the, so to speak, original sin of Socrates’ interlocutors as an excessive demand for guaranteed, unlimited, social affirmation and shows how such a demand, its grammar, unconsciously contains a more deep-rooted desire. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that this deep-rooted desire is part and parcel of both the constitution (the Urszene) and the sustenance of meaning, which the previous chapter identified as exactly that which Descartes’ first principle repressed. However, the essay does not provide a solution to the problem of truth and normativity, but rather only shows us how the use of reason becomes essentially an ethical task—a continuous engagement with the meaning that lives in-between us.
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Notes
- 1.
I will use the standard reference style by Stephanus number, e.g. (448 c) when referring to Plato’s works. Moreover, when referring to the Gorgias, I will only use the Stephanus number, while when referring to other dialogues, I will include the name of the dialogue (e.g. Republic, 514 a). The respective dialogues will be referred to in the reference list as follows: Apology (Plato 1997a); Cratylus (Plato 1997b); Gorgias (Plato 1997c); Republic (Plato 1997d); Theaetetu (PLato 1997e).
- 2.
Interestingly, we also find the same logic at the heart of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave (Republic, book VII). Remember Zeus’ diagnosis, in the eschatological tale in Gorgias, of why souls were misjudged and displaced, when people were judged alive by living judges: the judges and the judged, as well as their peers, had ‘put their eyes and ears and their whole bodies up as screens in front of their souls’ (523 c–d, emphasis added). In the allegory of the cave, on the other hand, the wall upon which the shadows of various artefacts are cast by the fire in the cave, and which composes the supposed reality of those chained in the cave, is also characterised as a ‘screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets’ (Republic, 514b, emphasis added). Now consider how Plato depicts life in the cave vis-á-vis outside of it.
‘What about when [the hero] reminds himself of his first dwelling place, his fellow prisoners, and what passed for wisdom there? Don’t you think he’d count himself happy for the change and pity the others?
Certainly
And if there had been any honors, praises, or prizes among them [the prisoners] for the one who was sharpest at identifying the shadows [on the screen] as they passed by and who best remembered which usually came earlier, which later, and which simultaneously, and who could thus best divine the future, do you think our man would desire these rewards or envy those among the prisoners who where honored and held power?’ (Republic, 516 c–d).
And then:
‘Consider this too. If this man went down into the cave again and sat down in his same seat, wouldn’t his eyes—coming suddenly out of the sun like that—be filled with darkness?
They certainly would.
And before his eyes had recovered—and the adjustment would not be quick—while his vision was still dim, if he had to compete again with the perpetual prisoners in recognizing the shadows, wouldn’t he invite ridicule? Wouldn’t it be said of him that he’d returned from his upward journey with his eyesight ruined and that it isn’t worthwhile even to try to travel upward? And, as for anyone who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him?
They certainly would.’ (Republic, 516 e–517 a)
As we can see, the reality of the screen-cum-wall in the cave is characterised fully in terms of a desire for and rejoicing in social prestige and affirmation, as is the screen-cum-body in the eschatological tale in Gorgias. That is, not only is life in the cave retroactively, i.e. when the rational soul has gained full rule over the individual, characterised as essentially a competition amongst the ‘perpetual prisoners’ for social prestige. For when the philosopher returns to the cave to help his fellow beings out of it, he not only has lost the ability to play along in the social game but, more importantly, is met with hostile resistance: ‘what passes for wisdom there’, i.e. the ability to gain social affirmation, is the very thing that resists the voice of reason. As one is tempted to interpret this, the moral-existential investment in the appetite for social affirmation is itself the very ‘chains and shackles’ of the prisoners.
- 3.
I think that many of us would, to some extent, find it, if not convincing, then at least close to the truth, to say that there is something fundamentally troubling about our mortality and, consequently, about being a living creature. And Socrates’ interlocutors do, in some sense, react to human mortality and finitude and think that oratory can, to some extent, secure them from this terrifying condition. Likewise, Socrates responds to Callicles’ claims by saying that a wise and just person should not fear death and that we would do best to not think so much about how to keep ourselves alive, but rather about how to live good lives (522d–e). So, fear of death (and pain) and the associated vulnerability of our embodied being are clearly part of the picture. However, as we have seen, we need to acknowledge how the fear of death and vulnerability are—in Gorgias—essentially, grammatically, entangled with a fear of losing face, with being humiliated; in the dialogue, we do not find any clear distinctions made between, on the one hand, a sheer and raw fear of death (or injustice) and, on the other hand, a fear of being seen in a shameful light by the social gaze, that is, of losing one’s affirmation or not achieving it in the first place. Put otherwise, it is of central importance to see that the vulnerability given voice to in the dialogue is not a vulnerability in some general sense (human morality and finitude), but specifically in relation to desire and its entanglement with social affirmation. For while we might certainly fear a tiger or a volcano (obviously, these two constitute grammatically different forms of fear from each other as well), we do not, in order to secure ourselves from them, seek or desire social affirmation from them (if we do so, then we have placed them within the dynamics of desire inherent in human relations, and to what extent we can do so, and what difference there is between doing so in relation to an animal and in relation to a volcano, is something to be discussed, but not here). Therefore, what we must seek to uncover is the dynamics involved in the specific fear to which the struggle for social affirmation is a reaction, a fear to which social affirmation is thought to be an antidote.
- 4.
In Gorgias Socrates comes with the (ironic) claim ‘that our bodies are our tombs’ (493 a). In the Cratylus dialogue, Socrates notes, echoing the Gorgias, that ‘some people say that the body (sōma) is the tomb (sēma) of the soul, on the ground that it is entombed in its present life, while others say that it is correctly called “a sign” (sēma) because the soul signifies whatever it wants to signify by means of the body’ (Cratylus, 400 c).
- 5.
Although it is of course true that one must be somewhat attentive as to how much a person is able to handle at a given moment, one does not want the other person to break down completely and become, for example, psychotic or self-destructive. On the other hand, though, it is not at all clear how one can control such things. Nor is it always clear to what extent it in fact is desirable that a person avoids harsh psychic difficulties. As far as I can see, facing up to one’s displacements means finding oneself ‘at the bottom of one’s pit’. As long as one has not reached the ‘bottom’, one can always fall deeper, or learn to live with or manage one’s displacements. There is, however, no general rule as to where or when one reaches one’s ‘bottom’. To find oneself ‘at the bottom’ is to (finally) acknowledge one’s predicament and that the ‘abyss’ is self-inflicted and self-created.
- 6.
Compare this with the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic. There we find the hero of the story, the philosopher, ‘compelled’ and ‘dragged’ (Republic, 515d–e) towards the opening of the cave out into the real world, where he encounters, not simply human artefacts or their shadows (as in the cave) but real things, illuminated—or animated—by the real sun (not the fire in the cave), which, being the ‘last thing to be seen’, is ‘the good’ (Republic, 517b). And then Socrates continues by saying that ‘one must conclude that [the good] is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything’ (Republic, 517c). This seems to me to be more or less similar to what I have suggested that the eschatological tale in Gorgias points towards. Namely, that reason cannot serve the pursuit of truth, of meaning, without the good (will); it is the goodness that makes the truth true. We cannot produce a good will through reason alone, nor can we reason to truth without a good will. As one might put it, and as I think Plato means it, reason without the good (will) is not reason proper.
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Toivakainen, N. (2023). The Truth of Desire Is Spoken Between Naked Souls: Reading Plato’s Gorgias. In: Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40276-0_4
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