Was
Polus refuted?
In
the Gorgias there are several issues of contention that cannot be
discussed in full, yet nonetheless can affect greatly whatever
conclusions are made in this essay. For instance distinguishing what
Socrates thought from what the Platonic Socrates thought is
difficult, but this seems more fitting for the study of classics.
There is dispute regarding translations too, definitions make or
break arguments and it is not always crystal clear the English term
is what was meant. In this essay I have used the World Classics
translation as a base1,
but much of the quotation comes from an article by Gregory Vlastos.
The Platonic Socrates will be simply called Socrates, for the sake of
brevity.
In Plato's
Gorgias,the discussion between Socrates and Gorgias comes to an end
when Polus interrupts and accuses Socrates of putting Gorgias in a
position where he felt too ashamed to say what he really thought.
They continue along the issue of rhetoric, which Polus initially
advocates the teaching and use of, while Socrates disagrees. The
discussion moves from rhetoric to power, where Polus sets out his
position that wronging another is better than suffering wrong, while
admitting that wronging another is 'uglier' than suffering wrong. The
introduction of the term 'ugly' is exploited by Socrates, and in the
text, it is clear he thinks he has refuted Polus and asserted his own
position. Gregory Vlastos was the first to dispute this in his
article of the same name as the essay, writing “[Plato] thought
Socrates' dialectic had refuted Polus' doctrine, when all it had done
was to refute the man.”2
This is the line I will take in answering “was Polus refuted?”.
Polus was certainly inconsistent in what he said, or was lead to say,
and so 'lost' the argument, but I do not think his central premises
about suffering and committing wrong were shown to be contradictory
in themselves, as Socrates claims. I agree with Vlastos' answer that
Polus the man was refuted, but the doctrine of Polus was not.
The
doctrine of Polus can be considered a pair of premises, which
Socrates thinks are contradictory:
Doing wrong
to another is better than having wrong done to you.
And
Doing wrong
to another is more ugly than having wrong done to you.
This
doctrine has a intuitive feeling to it. Premise 1 is particularly
survival-based, it is not strictly advocating doing wrong, just that
it is preferable given the alternative of suffering it. Premise 2
contains the ambiguity Socrates exploits, whether intentionally or
not is hard to say, though if he is to be believed, he thinks he is
proving Polus wrong with the truth, and brags“the truth can
never be proved wrong”3.
The ambiguity is to whom doing wrong is more ugly to.
Does Polus mean:
'Doing
wrong to another is more ugly to the wrongdoer'
or
'Doing
wrong to another is more ugly to the audience'
Where
'audience' could mean the sufferer, the public in general, or someone
present at the time of wrong-doing. The exact meaning of audience is
not all that important, almost any interpretation of 'audience' as
long as it is understood as not the wrongdoer, would get Polus out of
the contradiction Socrates claims is contained in premise 1 and 2.
After
Polus' premises are made, Socrates starts by asking him of beauty;
“In the case of all beautiful things-such as bodies,
colours, figures, sounds, practices - don't
you call them "beautiful" with an eye to something?”4
before stating examples of the listed beautiful things. It is very
clear from this statement however that things are considered
beautiful by the beholder or viewer with an eye
to something,
that is, a standard of the beholders creation, that is used to decide
if it is beautiful or not. The objective conclusion Socrates reaches
cannot at all be considered to be present in this first statement.
In
the first example the standards of beauty one compares bodies to is
“...either on account of their
usefulness for some particular purpose or because of a certain
pleasure, if
they delight their beholder in beholding them”.4
The
qualification “...if
they delight their beholder in beholding them” is
meant to carry over to examples 2 and 3, in which Socrates
shortens the sentences, which begin with “So
too in the case of...”4
and “And likewise in the
case of...”4
This
manner of considering examples is clearly intended to keep the same
qualification even though it is omitted after example 1.
Example
4: “And further in the case
of laws and practices: does not their beauty fall within the scope of
usefulness or pleasure or of both?”4
the
use of “and further in the
case of...”
makes it seem that this example has the same form as the previous
ones which all had the qualification of 1: “...if
they delight their beholder in beholding them”
but Socrates is not asking this at all, it is now a question of
usefulness or pleasure of both, the importance of how things seem to
the beholder is gone, and peerless Polus does not notice it.
Socrates
uses this to conclude “So
when one of two beautiful things is the more beautiful, it must be so
by surpassing the other in one or the other or both of these two
respects: pleasurableness, usefulness, or both...”4
if the examples were supposed to be consistent with the statement and
first premises qualification of beauty, this conclusion does not
follow, and no doubt Polus would be confused as to how he had hidden
this peculiar opinion in his very bare premises.
All
the quotations thus far have come from Vlastos' 'Was Polus Refuted?',
but here it is not helpful to use the translation he used for
Socrates' definition of ugly “...And
when one of two ugly things is the uglier, it must be so by
surpassing the other in painfulness or in evil”4
where Vlastos says in substituting 'evil' for 'harmfulness' and
'good' for 'usefulness' there is no skulduggery. If we keep in mind
that the respects that they have agreed on are usefulness for a
purpose, and pleasure, we can re-word it in a way that doesn't
introduce new synonyms 'And
when one of two ugly things is the uglier, it must be so by
surpassing the other in unpleasantness or in harmfulness'
where harmfulness is meant as harmful to a purpose, in this way it is
the opposite of usefulness to a purpose. This is almost exactly the
form that is found in the Oxford World Classics translation:
“And
when one of a pair of contemptible things is more contemptible than
the other, this is because it exceeds the other either in
unpleasantness or in harmfulness.”5
More simply one could say:
'when
one of two ugly things is the uglier, it must be so by being more
harmful or more unpleasant.'
Polus accepts this formulation,
and now the stage is set for Socrates' decisive argument, or so he
thinks.
The dialogue Socrates uses, while
rather straight forward, masks the ambiguity we identified at the
start of this essay in Polus' second premise regarding to whom
doing wrong is ugly to. Therefore I will present the few pages of
dialogue in premises and conclusion form that was given in the
relevant lectures, using the above formulation of 'more ugly'.
- Doing wrong to another is more ugly than having wrong done to you.
- This must be because doing wrong to another is either:a) more harmful than having wrong done to you.Orb) more unpleasant than having wrong done to you.
- One could find doing wrong pleasant.
- Therefore, 2-b is not the case.
- Therefore, 2-a is the case: Doing wrong to another is more harmful than having wrong done to you.
Socrates concludes Polus' premise
'Doing wrong to another is better than having wrong done to you' is
inconsistent with 5. Since 5 follows from 1 (Polus' other premise)
Polus' doctrine is refuted. This is not necessarily the case.
Remember the ambiguity of 'more ugly to whom', and we can reformulate
Socrates' argument as
- Doing wrong to another is more ugly than having wrong done to you.
- This must be because doing wrong to another is either:a) more harmful to the wrong-doer than having wrong done to you.b) more harmful for the audience than having wrong done to you.c) more unpleasant to the wrong-doer than having wrong done to you.d) more unpleasant for the audience than having wrong done to you.
- The wrong-doer could find doing wrong pleasant.
- Therefore, 2-c is not the case.
- Therefore, 2-a is the case: Doing wrong to another is more harmful to the wrong-doer than having wrong done to you.
In this argument 5 clearly does
not follow from 1-4. 2-b is trivial, as the audience would be not be
harmed by you doing wrong or suffering wrong. But there is nothing to
stop 2-d being the case, in fact it seems this is the sense in which
Polus meant his premise to be read. It seems to be the case that the
audience would find your actions more unpleasant when you do wrong.
The audience would have to be pretty unsympathetic to find you
suffering wrong more unpleasant than you doing wrong.
To
recognise that this argument does not lead to the internal
contradiction of Polus' premises 'Doing wrong to another is better
than having wrong done to you' and 'Doing wrong to another is more
ugly than having wrong done to you' Is to recognise Socrates did not
refute Polus entirely. Polus was certainly defeated by first failing
to see the essential difference between pleasure and pleasure to the
beholder, and secondly letting Socrates change the meaning of his
second premise through the ambiguity of 'ugly to whom'. Of course it
could be said that Polus really meant 'ugly to the wrong-doer' but
this makes the two premises so obviously contradictory it seems
no-one would bother to think of them as a doctrine. Terrence Irwin
suggests had Polus not denied that 'doing wrong is worse for the
wrong-doer than suffering wrong' in the objective sense of 'wrong',
whether or not he realised it, denied himself an avenue of escape by
suggesting 'suffering wrong is worse for me than some shameful
actions'.6
Additionally, Polus could have
meant ugly in that sense but retain the qualification of 'to the
beholder' and so avoid Socrates' strict objective dichotomy of
harmful and unpleasant. For these reasons, it was not the doctrine
of Polus that was shown to be inconsistent by Socrates, and hence
refuted, but merely the man.
Bibliography
1Robin
Waterfield, The World Classics Plato Gorgias, Oxford
University Press 1994
2 Gregory Vlastos, “Was
Polus Refuted?” The American Journal of
Philology, Vol. 88, No. 4, (Oct., 1967),
pp. 454-460. The Johns Hopkins University Press, page 459
4 Gregory Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?” The
American Journal of Philology, page
455
5 Robin
Waterfield, The World
Classics Plato Gorgias,
section 475b page 50
6Terence
Irwin, Plato's Ethics, Oxford University Press Inc. (1995)
page 100
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