We do Plato violence in pressing his figures of speech or chains of
argument; and not less so in asking questions which were beyond the
horizon of his vision, or did not come within the scope of his design.
The main purpose of the Gorgias is not to answer questions about a
future world, but to place in antagonism the true and false life, and
to contrast the judgments and opinions of men with judgment according
to the truth. Plato may be accused of representing a superhuman or
transcendental virtue in the description of the just man in the
Gorgias, or in the companion portrait of the philosopher in the
Theaetetus; and at the same time may be thought to be condemning a
state of the world which always has existed and always will exist among
men. But such ideals act powerfully on the imagination of mankind. And
such condemnations are not mere paradoxes of philosophers, but the
natural rebellion of the higher sense of right in man against the
ordinary conditions of human life. The greatest statesmen have fallen
very far short of the political ideal, and are therefore justly
involved in the general condemnation.
Subordinate to the main purpose of the dialogue are some other
questions, which may be briefly considered:—
a. The antithesis of good and pleasure, which as in other dialogues is
supposed to consist in the permanent nature of the one compared with
the transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure,
knowledge and sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue
and pleasure, the real and the apparent, the infinite and finite,
harmony or beauty and discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry, are so
many pairs of opposites, which in Plato easily pass into one another,
and are seldom kept perfectly distinct. And we must not forget that
Plato’s conception of pleasure is the Heracleitean flux transferred to
the sphere of human conduct. There is some degree of unfairness in
opposing the principle of good, which is objective, to the principle of
pleasure, which is subjective. For the assertion of the permanence of
good is only based on the assumption of its objective character. Had
Plato fixed his mind, not on the ideal nature of good, but on the
subjective consciousness of happiness, that would have been found to be
as transient and precarious as pleasure.