Gorgias

​SOCRATES: But I will try to explain what rhetoric seems to me to be; and if it does not happen to be this, this Polus here will refute me. You call something body and something soul, do you not? GORGIAS: Of course. SOCRATES: Then do you also believe there is a state of good health for each of these? GORGIAS: I do. SOCRATES: What then? A health that seems to be, but is not? I mean something like this: many people seem to have their bodies in good condition, and no one would easily notice that they are not in good condition, except a doctor or one of the trainers. GORGIAS: You speak the truth. SOCRATES: I say that such a thing exists both in the body and in the soul, which makes the body and the soul seem to be in good condition, though they are not so at all. GORGIAS: This is so. SOCRATES: Come then, if I can, I will show you more clearly what I mean. Since there are two things, I say there are two arts: the one for the soul I call politics, but the one for the body I cannot name for you as one, but while the care of the body is one, I say there are two parts of it, gymnastics and medicine. And in politics, corresponding to gymnastics, there is legislation, and as the counterpart to medicine, justice. Now these indeed share with each other, since they are about the same thing, each of these pairs—medicine with gymnastics, and justice with legislation—yet they differ somewhat from each other. There being then these four, and they always caring, the one pair for the body, the other for the soul, for what is best, flattery, having perceived this—I do not say having known but having guessed—having divided itself into four, and having crept under each of the parts, pretends to be that which it has crept under, and cares nothing for what is best, but with what is always most pleasant it hunts after folly and deceives, so that it seems to be of the greatest value. Under medicine, then, cookery has crept, and pretends to know the best foods for the body, so that if a cook and a doctor had to compete before children, or before men as foolish as children, as to which of them knows about good and bad foods, the doctor or the cook, the doctor would die of hunger.

​SOCRATES: This, then, I call flattery, and I say such a thing is ugly, Polus—for I say this to you—because it aims at the pleasant without the best; and I say it is not an art but an experience, because it has no account to give of the nature of the things which it applies, by which it applies them, so that it cannot tell the cause of each. And I do not call an art that which is an irrational thing; but if you dispute about these things, I am willing to submit to an argument. Under medicine, then, as I say, the flattery of cookery is placed; and under gymnastics, in this same way, cosmetics, which is mischievous and deceptive and ignoble and illiberal, deceiving with shapes and colors and smoothness and clothing, so as to make people acquire an alien beauty and neglect their own which comes through gymnastics. So, that I may not speak at length, I am willing to tell you as the geometers do—for by now you would perhaps follow—that what cosmetics is to gymnastics, sophistry is to legislation, and what cookery is to medicine, rhetoric is to justice. However, as I say, although they are thus distinguished by nature, yet because they are close, sophists and rhetoricians are jumbled together in the same place and about the same things, and they do not know what to make of themselves, nor do other men know what to make of them. For indeed, if the soul did not rule the body, but the body ruled itself, and if cookery and medicine were not examined and distinguished by the soul, but the body itself judged, measuring by the pleasures directed toward itself, the saying of Anaxagoras would be realized to a high degree, my dear Polus—for you are experienced in these things—all things would be jumbled together in the same place, and medical, healthy, and culinary matters would be undistinguished. What I say rhetoric is, then, you have heard: a counterpart of cookery in the soul, as that is in the body. Perhaps, then, I have done a strange thing, because, while not allowing you to make long speeches, I myself have stretched out a long discourse. It is indeed right to forgive me; for when I spoke briefly you did not understand, nor were you able to make any use of the answer I gave you, but you needed an explanation.