Socrates Rhetoric Analysis

All these points of understanding thus far bring the dialogue around for Socrates to unequivocally apply his philosophical positions to politics where a just man is analogous to a just city. Socrates declares that “injustice and corruption of the soul is the most shameful thing” and relates this shame to the city-state where it is best to understand where one is wrong in one’s practices than continue into ruin. A citizen must be educated for true democracy to work. This is most evident when he applies his comparison between the apparently good and the actual good to the soul and politics. The soul is affected by flattery, rhetoric, and sophistry in the same way that cookery and cosmetics affects the body; it seems apparently good, healthy, and in order but this is true only by perception. A soul in this manner has not been acquainted with true justice which at this point in the dialogue it has been agreed upon that it is necessary for the health and

Although Socrates insists in Gorgias that the question of justice has only been brushed and in the entire dialogue, not much has been accomplished on the subject. What is clear, however, is that rhetoric and its seemingly beneficial effect on the individual and the city has been severely criticized. Although Socrates injects his own views into the conversation at times, it is only to show contrast to his interlocutor and present a different way of seeing things. His questions and ways of speaking concentrate on what is best, not at what is pleasant. To have the majority of the population, at least the men that participate in legislation, uneducated in the forms of justice, the good, and truth is to under and wrongly serve the city. Thus, for Socrates to be one of the only people bringing awareness to such issues and encouraging inquiry for its remedy, he is one of the only people in his day to practice