4 Plato 1 · On Speech and on Names. Handed down at the Academy, from his Gorgias and Cratylus
This book is about persuasion and about names. The heaviest speech in it is Callicles’, and Plato did not strike it out, nor does this scripture. He predicted correctly what would happen to the prophet — predicting correctly is not the same as being right.
1.1Gorgias was the most accomplished speaker of the age. He came to Athens and everybody went to hear him.
1.2My teacher asked him: what is it that you teach?
1.3He said: I teach men to speak, and to be believed.
1.4My teacher asked: to be believed about anything at all?
1.5He said: about anything. That is the best thing about my art.
1.6My teacher said: then let me ask you something. Consider a cook and a doctor.
1.7Both of them attend to the body.
1.8What the doctor prescribes often tastes bad, and sometimes it hurts.
1.9What the cook makes, everybody likes.
1.10Now put it to a vote among children: which of the two shall be our doctor?
1.11They will choose the cook. The cook wins, and wins in a landslide.
1.12From that day I have kept this sentence: a skilled speaker stands to a crowd as a cook stands to children.
1.13Gorgias said: then is my art a bad thing?
1.14My teacher said: no. A knife is not a bad thing either. In a doctor’s hand a knife heals; in another hand it wounds. (cf. Gospel of Antisthenes 4.21)
1.15Your art has no direction of its own. It goes wherever the man holding it goes.
1.16So what matters is not learning to speak. It is settling first where you mean to bring people.
1.17A man who learns to persuade before he has settled what is good has picked up a knife with no owner.