The Doctor and the Pastry Chef : Pleasure and Persuasion in Plato

The Doctor and the Pastry Chef: Pleasure and Persuasion in Plato’s Gorgias Penultimate draft – final version in Ancient Philosophy, 27, 2007 Jessica Moss The Gorgias’ ostensible subject is rhetoric, which it defines as a “producer of persuasion.” But the dialogue is also centrally concerned with another kind of persuasion: Socrates’ attempts to persuade his interlocutors to pursue the life of justice and philosophy. Socrates tells his interlocutors that the subject at issue between them is the most important one of all: “in what way one should live.” And he tries to persuade them to reject their own answers to this question and accept his own instead, not only attacking their views and making positive arguments for his own, but also saying outright and repeatedly that such persuasion is his goal: “I want...to persuade you to change your mind...Am I persuading you at all...?” (493c4-d1; cf. 494a3-5, 513c8-d1 and 527c5-6). The Gorgias not only emphasizes that Socrates wants to persuade people to choose the right life, however; it also emphasizes that he very often fails. This is dramatized in the progression of the dialogue: Gorgias is polite if uncomfortable; Polus is openly incredulous about Socrates’ claims even when his own have been formally refuted (480e1-2); Callicles ends by being so annoyed that he drops out of the conversation altogether, leaving Socrates to converse with himself in a parody of his failure to engage others (505d4 ff.). The dialogue offers explicit comments on Socrates’ lack of