James Boyd White, The Ethics of Argument: Plato's Gorgias and the Modern Lawyer, 50 U. Chi. L. Rev. 849 (1983):

"Socrates does occasionally say something to describe dialectic, but its clearest and truest definition is to be found not in what he says but in what he does." [851][see also 862]

The central questions that Socrates asks are: "who are you, what do you do, and what do you know?" [851]

[T]his line of questioning has the result of making conscious what before was not, the relation between self and culture. I am a football coach or a law professor, I say, but only then, when for Socrates that is not a sufficient answer, do I begin to realize that this identity is a cultural one, not necessary but chosen, and chosen by me without my wholly knowing or understanding it. In the ensuing conversation the interlocutor's account of himself and of his motives is his own to make no sense even in its own terms; it is seen to be internally incoherent. The one who claims to know, knows nothing after all. This is the elenchus or refutation of which Socrates repeatedly speaks . . . and it is the heart of dialectic. It results in a mortification or humiliation, and of a special kind, for one is mortified by the invocation not of new facts or ideas but of what one already knows or claims to know. One part of the self is appealed to against another part, and in the process a previously unrecognized self-contradiction is revealed.

The intellectual process by which this aspect of dialectic typically works is a movement from a point of disagreement between Socrates and his interlocutor to a more general proposition that both accept; this point of agreement is then shown, by reasoning sometimes sound, sometimes fallacious, to lead to conclusions opposite to those previously asserted by the interlocutor. In the process, the language of the interlocutor is remade, converted into what are called paradoxes, that is, previously impossible or unimaginable propositions that he must now accept or that he is at least incapable of rationally rejecting. The effect of this process is to disturb the relation between self and language, to break down the sense of natural connection and coherence between them. One comes suddenly to see both self and language as uncertain, as capable of being remade in relation to each other. The true aim of a dialogue that works this way, of the Gorgias among others, is nothing less than the shared reconstitution of self and language. [851-852]

"What matters between us is not the other witnesses who can be brought forward to support your view or mine, but whether you can make me your witness, or I can make you mine. For dialectic to exert its full force upon the individual mind, complete frankness is essential; it requires a kind of shamelessness in saying what one really thinks." [861]

"The aim of dialectic is to expose contradictions in one's thought, which to Socrates are contradictions in one's very self." [862]

The language of the Socratic dialogue is "not an artificial or theoretical language, based upon stipulative definitions that are then combined into propositions connected by the laws of logic, but is instead what might be called a natural or poetic language, in which terms have overlapping and inconsistent meanings, internal complexities and lacunae. Accordingly, in establishing this language the dialogue proceeds not by logical progression from premise to conclusion but in an associative fashion, with many reptitions of question, idea, and term, often leaving a subject only to return to it later, perhaps in a surprising way. It is full of play and paradox, and has the structure less of formal argument (as we usually think of it) than of a poem or drama or musical composition. The recurrences of terms and statements are not really repetitions after all, for they acquire new meaning from what else is said, as a metaphor or image or melody may do: at the end they make sense in a new way." [863]

"What the dialogue really seeks to teach its reader is not how to speak its language but how to remake a language of his own; not to learn a particular set of questions and dialectical responses, to be repeated on other occasions, but...how to ask questions of one's own." [869]

"How does the Gorgias seek to do this? It works upon the reader rather as Socrates did upon his interlocutors, by isolating and disorienting him, by creating a conscious gap between self and language that makes the nature of both problematic in new ways. Like the interlocutor, the reader is broken out of his culture, out of the language and activities that normally serve to define hi, and is prevented from defining himself by simply repeating established forms of speech or conduct. He is forced to function on his own: to take and define positions of his own creation, and to respond to those, valid and invalid, asserted by Socrates. In this way the dialogue defines and makes meaningful its central subject, the nature of the self and of community, for nothing less than this is at stake in the choice between 'rhetoric' and 'dialectic.' The apparently distinct subjects of the dialogue--the nature of rhetoric and dialectic, of the happy and unhappy life, and of proper statesmanship--are really one after all." [869]

Use rhetoric and dialectic, as White develops them from Gorgias to show how Posner is a rhetorician in the sense that Socrates uses that term in the Gorgias. White argues for a dialectical approach to reading.

"The goal of rhetoric . . . is the power to persuade (peitho) others, to reduce them to one's will. The goal of dialectic is the opposite of persuasion: to be instructed by being refuted (elenchomai), humiliated, corrected. This means that rhetoric naturally treats others as means to an end, while dialectic treats others as ends in themselves. Rhetoric persuades another not by refuting but by flattering him, by appealing to what pleases, rather than to what is best for him. If successful, it injures him. And it injures the persuader as well, for the flatterer, in the nature of things, becomes like the object of his flattery: he praises what the other praises what the other praises, blames what he blames; in the fullest sense he comes to speak the other's language, and unless the other is a model of excellence, one become what one would not be, in one's very self, and that is the worst . . . thing of all.

"Dialectic is wholly different both in method and in object. It proceeds not by making lengthy statements or exhibitions, but by questioning and answering in a one-to-one conversation. Its object is to engage each person at the deepest level, and for this it requires utter frankness of speech on each side, a kind of shamelessness in saying what one really thinks. One's concern is not with what people generally think but with what one things oneself and what the other thinks. This is not a competition to see who can reduce the other to his will, but a process of mutual discovery by mutual refutation. One accepts refutation gladly, for it reduces the divisions an disharmonies within the self, which Socrates tells Callicles are so much worse than those in discordant orchestra or those between oneself and other people. . . . The object of it all is truth, and its method is friendship, the full recognition of the value of self and the other in a universe of two." [869-870]

White points out that "the ideal of dialectic is never achieved" in the Gorgias. [870] "Socrates' attempts to establish relations of this kind all end in failure. Gorgias concedes a central point, but without really understanding it. Polus is refuted, but only in the limited sense that he is beaten and cannot go on. . .; he has not been brought to the position of independent understanding that dialectic requires. And Callicles, having begun by boasting of his total frankness, at the end simply refuses to talk with Socrates in any honest way and leaves him alone, without an interlocutor. . . ." [870-871]

Socrates was not able to bring his interlocutors to adopt his ways, nor is Plato able to do that for the reader.

Will we abandon our concern for wealth, power, physical beauty and devote all of our energies to the welfare of our souls? We know that we will not . . . [and] Plato knew it too. There is a profound truth in Alcibiades' claim that the one overriding emotion Socrates produces is shame: 'I cannot disavow the duty to do what he bids me to do, but as soon as I am out of his presence, I fall victim to the worship of the crowd. So I run away from him, and when I see him again, become ashamed of my former admissions.' Indeed, shame is an important part of the elenchic process." [Kenneth Seeskin, Socratic Philosophy and the Dialogue Form, 5 Philosophy as Literature 181, 190 (1982)]

White argues that it is the object of Plato's text to do what Socrates could not do, create a dialectical relationship with the reader. When this relationship works it "loosen[s] the moorings that connect the reader to his language and culture" and "breaks down his language so that he can say neither what he used to say, nor what Socrates offers him to say. He becomes a self outside his culture, faced with the fact of his own responsibility for making sense of what he hears and says, for becoming his own center of meaning and of language. The reader is led to see that what is at stake when he decides how to speak and what to say--whether to practice 'rhetoric' or 'idalectic'--is nothing less than 'who he is' and what kind of community he will have with others." [871]

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