The Virtue of Agency by Christopher Moore;

Author:Christopher Moore;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Debating the Value of Sôphrosunê in the Gorgias

The first half of the Gorgias concerns justice explicitly: Socrates reveals Gorgias’ inconsistency about his teaching of justice to his students, and he reverses Polus’ preference for doing injustice over suffering injustice, persuading him that wrongdoers ought to look forward to their punishment.18 In fact, in the dialogue’s first forty-four pages, no character uses the word sôphrosunê. The interlocutors’ attention to justice is explained by their focus on rhetoric’s power in the civic sphere, the democratic power to persuade assemblies about the just thing to do and the tyrannical power to exercise personal rule and thereby arrogate what is others’ to oneself. When Callicles first joins the conversation, skeptical about Socrates’ argumentative success—he accuses Socrates of repeated equivocation—the topic remains justice.19 And so it remains when Callicles offers his putatively radical sociopolitical theory, claiming that the conventional praise of justice is an ideology of the weak and comes from those who are unable to protect themselves otherwise from the overreach of the strong, and that justice actually denotes the success in that overreach by the strong.20

It is only once Socrates presses Callicles on the identity of the “stronger” or “superior” that sôphrosunê arises; once it does, and the conversation comes to concern the best way of life more than the correct sociopolitical theory, sôphrosunê becomes the focal idea of the conversation.21 Set at the very argumentative heart of the Gorgias is a debate about the value of that virtue. The debate does not occasion the fine-grained discussions of the virtue’s structure that we will find in the Republic and Charmides and does not equate it with wisdom or justice as we saw in the Protagoras, but it brings urgency to such careful discussions and refines some of their findings. Callicles disagrees with Socrates about sôphrosunê’s contribution to agency: he believes that it impedes doing what one intends, and is thus contra-agential; Socrates judges it essential for doing what one intends, and is thus pro-agential. Their disagreement turns on their attitude toward a person’s desires. Callicles treats all desires as, so to speak, equally one’s own and equally deserving of satisfaction; Socrates treats only those desires directed toward what’s good as worthy of one’s affirmation, commitment, and identification with, and thus deserving of satisfaction. This difference about desires amounts to a difference about agency. For Callicles, robust agency comes through satisfying one’s desires, and the more desire-satisfaction there is, the more agency there is. This is because for Callicles we are our desires; to be actualized as ourselves is for our desires to be realized. For Socrates, robust agency comes through satisfying only good desires, and the better those desires, the more agency there is. This is because for Socrates what’s good is what we ultimately desire; to be actualized as ourselves is for our desires for the good to be realized. Thus Callicles, taking sôphrosunê as the limitation of desire, judges it harmful to agency; Socrates, taking it in the same way, judges it conducive to agency.

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