let me just say that i read gorgias in three sittings and each time i had to lay down for a bit to think about what i just read. it was a lot to take in!
but basically, gorgias affirmed my opinion of plato; hes and asshole, and he also idolized socrates to the point where its almost like a creepy, fetishistic, obsession. i mean, barely anything is known about socrates other than what plato has written. socrates fanfiction, like i said!
either way, plato/socrates had a very narrow mind about it all. the way he explained what was just and what was unjust; he made it seem like everything is black and white, like every moral thing had a very specific definition and something HAD to follow that definition exactly to be considered that. he basically took a lot of things that are subjective and depending on the circumstances or situation and put them into separate boxes.
thats also why i felt like his style of Q&A kind of… changed. he was trying to take all these subjective, wibbly-wobbly things and forcing them into boxes when they were too volatile to be kept into these tiny definitive containers. so it escaped his grasp, and he got flustered to the point where he started to do a Q&A… with himself…
well, that could explain why socrates had a different style/approach in this text. who knows why plato decided to write that, though. i like to imagine that plato felt like his character of “socrates” became too perfect and too morally good, so he decided to give socrates some humility or something to prove that hes human and a believable character. hey, it fits the whole theme of socrates fanfiction, at least. gotta make your characters believable… even though socrates was a real person…?
oh plato, you mysterious, elusive asshole. we love you and hate you all at once, i swear to god.
It’s true that Plato (and possibly Socrates) argued that there could be clear definitions for concepts such as goodness, virtue, justice, and so we could determine exactly what sorts of actions or persons are good or just by seeing if they fulfill the requirements of the definitions. Of course, these are really hard to find, and in many of Plato’s earlier dialogues in which he writes Socrates as a character, the dialogues are just basically Socrates trying to determine if someone else’s definitions work or not (usually not) and there is no final answer/definition given at the end.
As I noted in lecture, I do myself wonder why Socrates ends up talking to himself in the end. Maybe he was flustered, or maybe he just thinks that that’s how you do philosophy–it has to be a dialogue where one person suggests ideas and another person tries to refute them…until either they are refuted and you have to come up with something better or they are not refuted and you decide to hold onto those ideas as possibly true (but still keep them open for possible revision later). He did say to those around him that if he says anything (to himself) that they disagree with, he wanted them to stop him and give their criticisms…he won’t be able to refute himself very well, by himself, so he would need others to take that role.
Those are my thoughts at the moment on that whole talking-t0-himself thing, but I bet they’ll change as I think about it more and talk to people about it more!