Platonic Reflections on the Aesthetic Dimensions of Deliberative Democracy Political Theory Volume 35 Number 3 June 2007 288-312 © 2007 Sage Publications 10.1177/0090591707299951 http://ptx.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Christina Tarnopolsky McGill University, Montreal, Canada This essay utilizes Plato’s insights into the role of shame in dialogical interactions to illuminate the aesthetic dimensions of deliberative democracy. Through a close analysis of the refutation of Polus in Plato’s dialogue, the Gorgias, I show how the emotion of shame is central to the unsettling, dynamic, and transformative character of democratic engagement and political judgment identified by recent aesthetic critics of Habermas’ model of communicative action and democratic deliberation. Plato’s analysis of shame offers a friendly amendment to these aesthetic critiques by showing how the psychological forces at the heart of shame make the outcome of our political engagements with others uncertain and unsettling, even while they make possible the kind of self-reflexivity necessary to foster the deliberative virtue of sincerity or truthfulness. Keywords: aesthetics; shame; deliberation; Plato; deliberative democracy I n recent years, Jurgen Habermas’ model of deliberative democracy and communicative action has come under attack by critics who argue that his conception of politics overlooks or, alternatively, overemphasizes certain “aesthetic”1 modes of reasoning and judgment. Linda Zerilli has recently argued that Habermas’ conception of politics as the adjudication of competing validity claims overlooks a more Kantian-Arendtian and democratic model of politics that includes a kind of validity that is not based on “the application of rules to particulars” and that conceives the primary task of political judgment to be the affirmation of human freedom rather than the Author’s Note: I thank the following people for their comments on earlier versions of this essay: Nathan Tarcov, Patchen Markell, Danielle Allen, Charles Larmore, Marlene Sokolon, Sara Monoson, Marianna Hopman, Richard Kraut, Jill Frank, Travis Smith, Horst Hutter, Catherine Lu, Mary Dietz, and two anonymous reviewers. I presented an earlier of the essay at the Concordia Political Theory Speakers’ Series in October of 2005 and at the Northwestern University Classical Studies Workshop in December 2005. 288 Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 289 problem of validity.2 Political judgments like aesthetic judgments do not proceed by subsuming particulars under a determinate concept even though these sorts of judgments do, of course, have their place in politics. Rather they involve “an imaginative extension of the concept beyond its ordinary use in cognitive judgments and affirm freedom.”3 For Zerilli, rhetoric, narrative, and even more fundamentally, the imagination, have a place in politics precisely because they can serve this role of enlarging the very concepts and pictures that collectively constitute or create the world for us in the political realm of appearance.4 Alternatively, Davide Panagia has argued that Habermas’ image of political thinking is actually limited by the fact that it “carries with it a tacit aesthetic dimension that makes sincerity (or trust or truthfulness) a credentialing virtue hidden in the larger procedural aspects of his theoretical writings.”5 The criterion of sincerity, which by Habermas’ own account is only supposed to be characteristic of the reasoning involved in the aesthetic domain of validity (as opposed to the other two domains: cognitive/scientific and interactive/normative that he also inherits from Kant), actually comes to underlie his project as a whole in the form of his prescriptions against the “performative contradiction.” As Panagia puts it, “In order to speak properly and have what they say be valid, individuals are required to speak as though they are telling the truth of themselves in public.”6 Habermas’ image of democratic deliberation, which valorizes the virtue of sincerity, arises out of his understanding of the ways in which the art critics of the eighteenth century began to challenge the political structures of authoritative and aristocratic societies by grounding their criticisms in the force of the better argument.7 However, as Panagia goes on to argue an alternative aesthetic sensibility8 arising out of a more plebeian but still public sphere offers a very different model of political thought and deliberation where lack of coherence and sincerity in the form of unsettledness becomes a democratic virtue,9 and where unrepresentability rather than representability becomes a principle of democratic politics.10 According to Panagia, Habermas’ prescription against the performative contradiction, though specifically directed against contradiction in philosophical argument, represents a more fundamental but counterproductive desire to resolve the tensions and unsettledness that always arise out of our sentimental and imaginative engagements with the world.11 Sympathy and antipathy, love of liberty and hatred of tyranny, love of the self and hatred of the self are what always simultaneously motivate our desire to change ourselves and our world.12 Thus both Zerilli and Panagia argue that the force of the better arguments occurring in political life has important affective and imaginative 290 Political Theory dimensions that need to be understood utilizing an aesthetic approach to the problem of political critique and judgment.13 For Zerilli this force is expansive rather than subsumptive, whereas for Panagia it is unsettling and disunifying rather than comforting and unifying. However, Zerilli’s particular elaboration of the aesthetic dimension of political judgment ultimately ends up focusing primarily on the role of the imagination and the force of images and paradigms. Considerably less attention is paid to the bodily or emotional aspects that she claims require equal acknowledgement as part of the associational force of political life. Although Zerilli is certainly correct and primarily concerned to point out that Arendt’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment foregrounds the political, imaginative, and communal character of judgments of taste,14 it is also true that for Arendt these aesthetic practices of freedom and exchanges of argument taking place in the public world inevitably involved shame.15 Following Arendt’s lead, I will show why the emotion of shame lies at the very heart of this debate about the aesthetic character of dialogical engagements and political judgments. The Greek word, aisthe–sis, means sense perception or sensation and it was this connotation that was originally central to Alexander Baumgarten’s modern resurrection of the term, “aesthetics,” in his Reflections on Certain Matters Relating to Poetry in 1735. As Panagia argues in his book, The Poetics of Political Thinking, Plato’s image of the cave highlights the fact that exposure to enlightenment and liberation involves a painful physical, emotional, and psychological compulsion: “It affects our senses as much as our mind, and it appeals to a level of discernment that enervates our somatic sensitivities as well as our cognitive faculties.”16 Thus an aesthetic understanding of dialogical engagements must try to understand how sensation as well as the imagination provides compelling and constitutive forces that are involved in any attempts to judge politically. The faculty of sense perception that Plato singles out in the Republic’s famous depiction of enlightenment is the eyes. As Socrates tell Glaucon, “And if he were compelled (anagkazoi) to look at the light itself, would not that pain his eyes, and would he not turn away and flee to those things which he is able to discern and regard them as in very deed more clear and exact than the objects pointed out? (Republic 515e)”17 As an ancient Greek proverb puts it, “Shame is in the eyes,”18 and for both Plato and Aristotle shame involves the painful awareness of some kind of inadequacy in the self first brought to light by the gaze of others. It is also important to note that the Attic Greek verb, elencho-, used to describe Socrates method of bringing enlightenment to himself and others, means to put to shame, dishonor, refute, disprove, test, get the better of, prove, or question someone.19 The close link Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 291 between the psychological and logical force of Socrates’ political arguments is always in play in Plato’s dialogues. Indeed there is an inherent uncertainty or ambiguity in the very word, elenchos (refutation/shaming), about whether Socrates’ refutations are intended to shame or just refute his interlocutors. I will argue that it is the painful recognition central to the occurrent experience of shame, produced by the Socratic elenchus, that Plato thinks both facilitates and endangers the judgments that are central to politics for both Zerilli and Arendt. I will thus supplement Zerilli’s treatment of the potentially expansive force characteristic of political judgments by focusing on the psychological forces that lie at the heart of shame. The first section of this essay will examine the moment of recognition within the occurrent experience of shame and the different possible reactions to this recognition as Plato dramatizes this in the dialectical encounter between Polus and Socrates in the Gorgias.20 Plato’s treatment of shame shows us precisely why “feeling our freedom,”21 expanding our concepts, and imagining new ways of conceptualizing the world might actually be painful and unsettling even while it can be simultaneously exhilarating and pleasurable. He also shows us that the painfulness of the experience can work as a counterforce to the potential benefits that would arise through an expansion of our concepts, thus making the outcome of an encounter that involves shame very uncertain. In the conclusion I apply these Platonic insights to the particular examples of gay marriage and gender equality that Zerilli uses to illustrate her notion of political judgment in order to show that the force of these judgments always point simultaneously in two directions and has expansive and constrictive tendencies. Second, I will offer a friendly amendment to Panagia’s treatment of the democratic virtues of unsettledness by showing precisely how a Habermasian account of “coming to an agreement” might actually see the reciprocal production of perplexity in a dialectical encounter as a necessary but insufficient step in the process of becoming more sincere deliberators. As I argued in Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Contemporary Politics of Shame, “in the occurrent experience of shame we are faced with the recognition that we are not who we thought we were.”22 In this essay, I will show precisely how the encounter between Polus and Socrates in the Gorgias involves this kind of disclosure of a disunified but for that reason, more sincere self. I will focus on the salutary perplexity of Polus where he recognizes the distance between himself and the tyrant he thinks that he admires, even while he begins to recognize his proximity to a wholly new “other”, i.e., the practice of Socratic philosophizing. In the conclusion, I will apply these Platonic insights to Panagia’s treatment of the simultaneous existence of contraries in 292 Political Theory the self to show how a Platonic and Habermasian account of the deliberative virtue of sincerity can incorporate these moments of unsettledness. It will of course strike many readers as strange that I would want to use Plato to augment and enrich an account of the “aesthetic” turn on political judgment and communicative interaction already made on the Habermasian model by Panagia, Zerilli, and others. The Gorgias depicts a private discussion between Socrates and the foreign rhetorician, Gorgias, then between Socrates and Gorgias’ pupil, Polus, and finally between Socrates and the fictional Athenian democrat, Callicles, on the topics of rhetoric, justice, and moderation, and does not depict democratic deliberations at all. Second, the dialogue contains some of his harshest criticisms of democratic Athens, and for this reason it has been interpreted as Plato’s own “Apology” in which he outlines his reasons for forgoing a career in Athenian politics in favor of opening a school of philosophy.23 It is also the dialogue that allegedly sets up the problematic binaries between rhetoric and philosophy, opinion and truth, emotion and reason, and persuasion and argumentation in the initial conversation between the philosopher, Socrates, and the renowned rhetorician, Gorgias.24 Arendt herself accuses Plato of all of these things and she insists that the whole tradition of western philosophy began “when the death of Socrates made Plato doubt certain fundamentals of Socrates’ teachings” and thus turn away from the political.25 My full response to these reservations depends on a controversial reinterpretation of Plato vis-à-vis democratic Athens that I develop at length in my forthcoming book on Plato and the politics of shame.26 However, my brief response for purposes of this essay relies on the following considerations. In response to the first criticism, as both Bernard Yack and Paul Nieuwenburg have argued with regard to Aristotle, there are important structural similarities between the process by which we change our judgments in our dialogical exchanges with an “other,” whether this other is another part of oneself (individual deliberation), another person (dialectics), or a mass audience (democratic deliberation).27 This does not mean that one can or ought to conflate these processes and indeed one of the virtues of using Plato’s Gorgias instead of Aristotle’s various works is that Plato dramatizes the similarities and differences between these processes in a single work.28 At various places in the Gorgias, Plato introduces the cheers, views, or urgings of the actually present crowd (Gorgias 458c, 497b), or the imaginary audience of democratic Athens (Gorgias 452d, 474c, 494e) to get each of his interlocutors to consider how their remarks would be viewed not just by Socrates, but also by one of these more collective and forceful “others.” At these very moments, Plato alerts the reader to the central importance of shame because he has one of the characters Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 293 remark on how this emotion made someone change one of their original premises: Polus accuses Gorgias of this at Gorgias 461b, Callicles accuses both Polus and Gorgias of this at Gorgias 482d, and Socrates accuses Polus and Gorgias of this at Gorgias 487b.29 This point about the importance of the imaginary Athenian democratic audience leads to my response to the second criticism. Although the Gorgias does contain harsh criticisms of certain Athenian democratic practices, these criticisms are often based on the fact that they endanger certain ideals explicitly espoused by the Athenian “civic self image” or “normative imagery.”30 For example, although Socrates’ distinction between his elenctic method of producing one witness to confirm the truth of his conclusions and Polus’ method of calling in the false witness of the many (Gorgias 471e-472d) seems like a Platonic rejection of democratic governance, it is actually meant to highlight the fact that when the many act like an ignorant mob of base flatters they endanger the democratic practice of parrhe-sia (free or frank speech).31 This Athenian democratic ideal required that the individual democrat have the courage to be truthful about his views, to refuse to flatter his audience, and to stand alone against the mob even when his views entailed the risk of fines, imprisonment, or even death. It is precisely this ideal that Socrates later argues is required if he and his interlocutors are going to discover “the true things themselves,” (Gorgias 487a)32 and that becomes central to Socrates’ own description of the true art of rhetoric, which requires accusing oneself, one’s relatives and one’s fatherland of injustice (Gorgias 480b–480d). My response to the third criticism about the problematic binaries that are allegedly inaugurated by Plato’s Gorgias depends on my own interpretation of the dramatic structure of the dialogue and of its place within Plato’s corpus.33 As a transitional dialogue between Plato’s early and middle period, it contains Plato’s presentation of what he saw as both salutary and problematic about Socrates’ elenctic encounters with others in democratic Athens. This critique of Socrates depends upon Plato’s own deepening understanding of the psychological forces that motivated both Socrates and his Athenian democratic contemporaries, but that is only fully developed in the tri-partite psyche of the Republic. It also contains what Plato saw as both salutary and problematic about the spectacular, epideictic display rhetoric that Gorgias was renowned for, and that involved masterfully placing before the eyes of one’s audience all kinds of beautiful and pleasing images. So the Gorgias does not inaugurate the problematic distinction between rhetoric and philosophy, emotion and reason, and opinion and truth but rather represents a fusion of horizons between Gorgianic rhetoric and Socratic philosophy. This is why I argued in my article, “Prudes, Perverts 294 Political Theory and Tyrants,” that there is a need to differentiate a third kind of shame on display in the Gorgias: i.e., Platonic respectful shame, which is different from both Gorgianic flattering shame and Socratic respectful shame.34 Following Nietzsche, and contra Arendt, I believe that the Greeks’ aesthetic understanding of the world was saved on the barge of Plato’s poetic dialogues,35 which fused and preserved what Plato saw as salutary in both Gorgias’ rhetorical and Socrates’ philosophical practices. Applying this dramatic interpretation to the Gorgias I believe that the dialogue shows 1) how Socrates’ elenctic refutation/shaming of his interlocutors is meant to produce a salutary form of perplexity; 2) how this perplexity opens up a number of different possible reactions: hiding from, contesting, or transforming either oneself or the “other” responsible for this perplexity; 3) what Plato saw as problematic about Socrates’ respectful shaming of others that made them react by hiding from or getting angry with him; 4) what Plato saw as problematic about Gorgias and Polus’ flattering sense of shame that left their audience’s pre-deliberative preferences intact; and 5) how the myth at the end of the Gorgias exemplifies Plato’s own fusion of Socratic philosophy and Gorgianic rhetoric as a way of redressing these limitations and introducing a spectacular, memorable, and vivid image of Platonic philosophizing into the Athenian democratic normative imaginary. This mythico-philosophic and friendly amendment to both Socratic philosophy and Gorgianic rhetoric dramatically exemplifies a respectful shaming of both Socrates and Gorgias because it reveals the inadequacy of their own modes of comportment towards others as this was displayed in the initial parts of the dialogue. The Beautiful and the Shameful: The Dialogical Exchange Between Polus and Socrates My first point about the salutary perplexity that is produced in each of Socrates’ interlocutors is vividly illustrated by Socrates’ ability to shame them into contradicting one of their initial premises or beliefs. Gorgias initially declares that the rhetoric he teaches is morally neutral and has no effect on whether his students make a just or unjust use of it (Gorgias 465d–457c). Yet Socrates is able to momentarily shame him into admitting that no student of his will ever make an unjust use of rhetoric (Gorgias 460d–e). The refutation of Polus comes in between the refutation of Gorgias and Callicles and will be examined in detail below. Finally, Callicles enters the discussion, espousing the life of tyranny and argues that Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 295 this includes pleonexia (taking more than one’s share) and indiscriminate hedonism (the pursuit of any and all pleasures) (Gorgias 491e–492a). Socrates, though, is momentarily able to shame him into admitting instead that some pleasures are better than others, and that some pleasures need to be restrained (Gorgias 499b–e). Callicles’ praise of the life of the tyrant is actually prompted by the prior discussion that Socrates has with Gorgias’ student, Polus. Immediately after Gorgias’ refutation, Polus jumps into the discussion and tries to defend his teacher and his teacher’s doctrines against Socrates’ shaming tactics. In this section, the discussion gradually moves from an examination of the moral neutrality of Gorgianic rhetoric to Polus’ explicit praise of the life of the tyrant, Archelaus (Gorgias 471a4–471d3). In this speech Polus focuses on the external goods that the tyrant obtains through force and then turns to the bodily and external evils that the unsuccessful tyrant must suffer (Gorgias 473c1–473d1). This latter unfortunate person is tortured, castrated, impaled, has his eyes burned out, and is also forced to watch his wife and children suffer the same fate (presumably before his eyes are burned out). Polus uses this speech to argue that it is better to do injustice than it is to suffer it. In the next part of the refutation, however, Socrates gets him to admit that it is more shameful to do injustice than it is to suffer it (Gorgias 474c5), and from this concession Socrates is finally able to prove his own thesis, that it is in fact worse to do injustice than to suffer it (Gorgias 475c9). The Polus refutation reveals just how difficult the question of sincerity and insincerity becomes when one addresses the complexity and dynamic character of an emotion like shame. The problem can be seen if we examine how two different commentators on this refutation have analyzed the dialectical encounter between Polus and Socrates. Richard McKim and Charles Kahn have both argued that shame is the crucial element at play in the dialectical encounter between Polus and Socrates, but they both take opposing views of the ways in which this emotion works to get interlocutor’s to consent to premises or conclusions that they don’t fully agree with.36 When Polus argues that doing injustice is more shameful than suffering it, Kahn asserts that he is being insincere and simply tailoring his remarks to conventional Athenian wisdom. Hence, he is uttering out of shame what he really believes to be false.37 McKim on the other hand thinks that the only other alternative is to say that Polus is uttering out of shame what he really (though at this point unconsciously) believes to be true.38 These interpretations, however, still leave out a number of possibilities that might characterize Polus’ situation. First, a person can utter something that is true about certain aspects of their life and false about others. Second, 296 Political Theory the person might be in the process of learning something new about himself or about the other person with whom he is conversing, while not fully understanding all of the ramifications of what he is now asserting. This, though, is not the same thing as lying or being insincere about these matters. If we see shame not so much as maintaining the boundaries between a static psyche and a political world, but rather as dynamically constructing and constantly renegotiating what occurs on either side of the boundaries then the logic of a shame refutation becomes very difficult to pin down. As Kahn suggests, to understand Plato we must see the logic of a shame refutation as protreptic rather than deductive.39 The perspective from which we might make a judgment about ourselves as well as the referent of the judgment (i.e., who we are) can change in the process of coming to learn something new about oneself in our engagement with others. I believe that it is this possibility that allows one to understand the communicative situation between Polus and Socrates as well as the definition of the shameful and beautiful that Socrates gets Polus to accept. It is not so much that Polus is lying or being insincere when he comes to an agreement with Socrates about the shamefulness of the life of tyranny, but that he has become perplexed about his own views on this topic and is on the way to learning something new about himself, about the tyrant, and about the very activity of Socratic philosophizing that he is now experiencing. Plato himself explicitly flags this perplexity or uncertainty in the dialogue itself by the different responses that Polus makes to the various steps of Socrates’ argument: The first three times that Polus responds to the argument he uses the terms, “panu ge” (“certainly”) twice and the term, “anagke-” (“necessarily”) once (Gorgias 475a–475b). However by the end of the argument he uses the terms, “eoiken” (“it looks that way”) twice and “phainetai” (“apparently”) twice (Gorgias 475c–475e) in response to Socrates’ conclusions. Finally, at the end of the dialectical encounter between Polus and Socrates, when Socrates asks Polus whether he agrees with all of the conclusions they have reached about rhetoric, Polus exclaims: “Atopa men, oSo-krates, emoige dokei, tois mentoi emprosthen iso-s soi homologeitai.” (“To me, Socrates, they seem strange indeed; but perhaps you make them agree with the things said before” Gorgias 480e). Here it is important to note that the word translated as “strange” is atopos, which literally means “out of place,” but also has the connotations of extraordinary, strange, paradoxical, unnatural, disgusting, foul, marvelous, and absurd.40 The Attic Greek word that Plato uses to express Polus’ perplexity thus exemplifies the co-presence of contraries valorized by Panagia’s notion of democratic engagement: i.e., disgust and wonder, as well as the exhilarating and disorienting feeling of Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 297 discovering new: i.e., extraordinary, ways of seeing the world valorized by Zerilli’s notion of political judgment. Socratic Equivocations In order to see how the refutation works and how Socrates actually succeeds in producing this perplexity in Polus, it is necessary to summarize this argument in detail and to insert the survey of examples from which Socrates derives his definition of to kalon (the fine/beautiful/noble) and its opposite, to aischron (the foul/ugly/shameful). It is, of course, important to point out that my summary is not the way Plato himself actually presents his doctrine, and indeed Polus’ expressions of perplexity punctuate the refutation and dramatize the dynamic effects that these ideas have on Polus’ understanding of himself and the world around him. When commentators of the Gorgias only see Plato’s doctrine in terms of this kind of logical summary, they fail to see what Plato is trying to dramatize in the dialogue. Here are the logical steps of the argument: (1) p - Doing injustice is better than suffering injustice (Gorgias 474c5). (2) q - Doing injustice is more shameful (aischrion) than suffering injustice (Gorgias 474c7). r - All fine/admirable/beautiful things (ta kala panta) are called this with reference either to their utility/benefit (o-pheleia) or their pleasure (he-done-) or both. (Derived from the following survey of examples.) r .a. Beautiful bodies are called beautiful because they are useful for some purpose or because of the pleasure that they give to the beholder (Gorgias 474d3–5). r .b. Shapes and colors are called beautiful because of some pleasure or benefit or both (Gorgias 474e1). r .c. All voices and things relating to music are beautiful for the same reason (Gorgias 474e4). r .d. All laws and practices are beautiful because they are beneficial or pleasant or both (Gorgias 474e7–8). r .e. All sciences are beautiful for the same reason (Gorgias 475a2). s - The shameful is defined by the opposite of the beautiful, which is pain (lupe-) and badness/evil (kako-n) (Gorgias 475a5). t - If doing injustice is more shameful than suffering injustice, then it exceeds suffering injustice in pain or in badness, or in both (Gorgias 475b7–9). (From s.) 298 Political Theory u - Doing injustice does not surpass suffering injustice in pain (Gorgias 475c1–2). v - So doing injustice cannot surpass suffering injustice in both pain and badness (Gorgias 475c6). (From t.) (3) q - v entail not-p - Therefore doing injustice must surpass suffering injustice in badness. In other words, doing injustice is worse than suffering injustice (Gorgias 475c8–10). (4) not-p - What I was saying was therefore true, that neither I nor you nor any other human being would welcome doing injustice rather than suffering injustice; for it happens to be worse (Gorgias 475e5). Equivocation of Perspective There are actually three elements of Socrates’ refutation of Polus that make it logically problematic, but for that reason, psychologically telling. The first is that Socrates never fully specifies in all of the examples whether it is the agent, the patient, or the spectator who is judging the object to be useful/beneficial or pleasant. (I shall refer to this henceforth as the equivocation of perspective.) His first two examples: i.e., beautiful bodies, shapes, and colors seem to point primarily to the pleasure of the spectator. But his next example also points to the pleasure of the agent performing the music as well as the one listening to it. His examples of laws and practices seem to point primarily to the participants, i.e., to the agent enacting or exercising the laws and to those subject to them. Finally, the example of the sciences also seems to point primarily to the two participants: i.e., to the teacher and the student who are engaged in the activity, and it seems strange to speak of a spectator to this activity. The logical problem with this argument is that Socrates claims to have proven that “doing injustice is worse for the agent than suffering injustice is for the victim.” But he ends up only proving that “doing injustice is worse for X than suffering injustice is for X,” where X might be the agent performing the acts of injustice, but it might also be the community beholding his acts of injustice.41 Socrates has not proven the stronger conclusion that doing injustice is worse for the agent because his definitions of the beautiful and shameful are indeterminate about whether it is the participants (the agent or victim) or the spectator (the community) who is judging the act or thing to be useful or pleasant, harmful, or painful. In order to be logically valid the perspective would have to be fixed throughout the argument. And when it is consistently fixed, it becomes clear that Socrates’ inference (see 3 and 4 above) is not logically entailed by the premises he gets Polus to accept.42 Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 299 Instead what Socrates does is to get Polus to agree to his definition of the beautiful (i.e., as the useful/beneficial or the pleasant or both [r] by considering the uses or pleasures experienced by observers of beautiful bodies, colors, shapes, etc. But he then gets Polus to concede to premise u (i.e., doing injustice does not surpass suffering injustice in pain) by considering the relative pain of the two participants to an act of injustice. Thus even if it is the case that suffering injustice is more painful to the victim of injustice than doing it is to the doer, this does not mean that Socrates can then conclude that doing injustice must then be more harmful to the agent. Given the definition of the beautiful and shameful he is working with, he has not foreclosed the logical possibility that while it is more painful for the victim to suffer injustice it might only be more harmful for the community (the spectator) than for the agent to commit it. Equivocation of Goods The second problematic aspect is the fact that Socrates subtly moves from the sensuous pleasures and benefits of the body to the intellectual pleasures and benefits of the mind. (I shall refer to this henceforth as the equivocation of goods.) In the first three examples, Socrates speaks of the sensuous pleasures and benefits of beholding beautiful bodies, shape and colors, and of listening to music. But the example of “laws and practices” is more difficult to categorize. In fact, one of the central issues of the Gorgias, and of this refutation in particular, is what justice actually is. If justice consists of obeying laws that specify the punitive practices of punishment, then it would seem to be bad and painful for the victim’s body even if it is beneficial for the body of the community as a whole (i.e., in terms of protection or prevention).43 However, if it consists of the practice of helping others by disabusing them of false beliefs in the process of the Socratic elenchus or of suffering this practice, then it would seem to be good and either painful or pleasurable or both for the victim’s mind.44 Finally, the example of the sciences or instruction from a teacher (mathe–sis) makes the intellectual character of the possible benefits and/or pleasures even more explicit. Equivocation of Disjunction The third problematic aspect of Socrates’ definitions of the beautiful and shameful in this refutation arises from their disjunctive (or at least potentially disjunctive) character: the beautiful is the pleasant or the beneficial or both; the shameful is the painful or the harmful or both. (I shall refer to this 300 Political Theory henceforth as the equivocation of disjunction.) This is unique because it is the only instance in the early Socratic dialogues where Socrates himself puts forth definitions that fail to meet one of the primary criteria he uses for defining kinds, properties, or characteristics.45 This is the criterion that the kind, property, or characteristic being defined be common to all instances of it. Socrates’ disjunctive definitions of the beautiful and shameful thus fail to meet this criterion. To be more precise, they sometimes fail to meet this criterion, even though Socrates’ definition allows for the possibility that in some instances the shameful will be both painful and harmful and the beautiful will be both pleasant and good. Plato’s Psyche-logic of the Beautiful and the Shameful Various analytic commentators of the Gorgias have picked up on one or more of these logically problematic characteristics of the dialectical encounter between Polus and Socrates in order to find fault with Plato’s logic, without ever considering that what Plato might actually be doing is pointing to the different kinds of necessity or force that might be brought into play when two very different worldviews or conceptual schemas collide. Gregory Vlastos has argued that Socrates (and indeed Plato himself) equivocates on the perspective of the judgment of the beautiful or shameful because he does not have a fully developed notion of the beautiful, and by this he means the Kantian notion of a disinterested pleasure in apprehending or spectating something that is in no way related to one’s own desires or interests.46 According to Vlastos, if Plato had such a notion of the disinterested pleasure of apprehending that is the true hallmark of aesthetic judgment, then he would have consistently retained the spectator as the referent for the judgment of the beautiful or shameful. However, Vlastos’ solution actually fails to do justice to the depths of Plato’s insights about the phenomena of the beautiful and the shameful in human life. The equivocation of perspective is possible precisely because of the simultaneously self- and other-referential character of these two phenomena. The Greek experience of beauty and shame involved simultaneously looking in two directions at once: inward to the self who acts in the world and outward to the world shared with others who gaze upon us.47 It is this aspect of to aischron and to kalon that links them to the thumotic (spirited) element of the soul. As John Cooper puts it, “Plato’s introduction of this third [thumotic] kind of natural human desire, over and above reason’s desires for knowledge and for the good and appetite’s for pleasure, is Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 301 that there are effectively intermediate desires having always a reference to oneself, that aim at competitive exertion—at making something of oneself, of being active and in command (of oneself, and in relation to one’s fellows)” [my italics].48 What we are drawn to in the beautiful things and avoid in the shameful things of the world has to do with their order, symmetry, and fitness (or their lack thereof),49 but it is always at the same time a concern for how we ourselves now “fit” into this world. This also points to the dynamic but ambiguous character of these two phenomena for Plato. The spectator who criticizes the self in shame or who praises the self in beauty, can be appropriated into the very ideals or selfimages by which we then actively create and passively perceive the world. So there is always the possibility that the spectator and the agent/patient can become one and the same, even though there is also the possibility that the spectator’s perspective will not be appropriated into our psyche. In the occurrent experience of shame we entertain or recognize the spectator’s gaze upon the self as a criticism of this self and thus feel the gap that that opens up between the old self that we were and the new self we might now become. The experience is thus a “disinterested” one because we are in between this old and new self and are in the process of transforming the very interests and preferences that we had prior to our recognition of the gaze of the “other.”50 But we do not thereby have to assent to the judgment of this “other” and transform ourselves in accordance with it, because we can also hide from, transform or contest this “other” or simply hold it in abeyance even while acknowledging its weight as an “other.” All of these psychological possibilities are opened up by the occurrent experience of shame. As I stressed in my article, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” there is no psychological or logical necessity that the gap will be filled by any one specific reaction, and indeed our reactions to the gap might involve elements of all of these things.51 The dialectical encounter between Socrates and Polus is thus used by Plato to disclose the unique character of the occurrent experience of shame that lies at the intersection between self and world, but it is also meant to dramatize the possible positive and negative ways we might react to this experience. This last remark also points to the potentially disjunctive character of Socrates’ definition of to aischron and to kalon. The disjunctive character arises from the fact that the beautiful and the shameful are not virtues for Plato, but rather they are the psychic mechanisms by which we come to have certain virtues or vices and thus become certain types of people. They have a part to play in both the education and the corruption of our psyche in its on-going interactions with the world of ‘others.’ The question of 302 Political Theory whether shame becomes a virtue or vice depends in large part on how we try to fill the gap between the self and the “other” that opens up for us. To react to the occurrent experience of shame by slavishly mimicking the viewpoint of the “other” instantiates the vice of flattery or conformity, to react by pretending to take the viewpoint of the “other” in order to gain a strategic advantage for oneself instantiates the vice of hypocrisy, to react by hiding from the truth that the “other” has shown you about yourself instantiates the vices of cowardice and/or self-deception. Alternatively to react to the occurrent experience of shame by actually transforming and expanding the collective images of oneself or others that come to light in the dialogical encounter instantiates the virtues of sincerity and respect.52 I want to turn now to explain how these things come to light in Socrates’ refutation of Polus. In an important sense the refutation of Polus is ad hominem because it begins with two important elements of Polus’ character. The first one is that Polus tends to be a slave to public opinion.53 As Polus tells Socrates at 462c8, he (Polus) thinks that gratifying public opinion is a kalon (fine/beautiful/noble) pursuit. In fact he thinks that this is what rhetoric is all about. It involves flattering one’s audience based on one’s own knack for understanding what has gratified them in the past. This is why Socrates begins with two wholly other-directed examples of beauty in his refutation of Polus: in the case of beautiful bodies, shapes, and colors, the judgment of beauty is determined solely by the use or pleasure that the user or beholder gets from the beautiful being. In these examples the beauty of the body or shape is not presented as being either good or pleasant to the being that exemplifies it. In this respect, it is similar to the flattering practice or “alien beauty” of cosmetics: it is directed to the gratification of the beholder and not to the good of the one who wears the makeup (Gorgias 465b). The second important aspect of Polus’ character that Socrates’ builds upon is the fact that Polus, like Callicles, preaches tyranny but doesn’t practice it. Polus is a student of rhetoric and of his teacher Gorgias, not a student of violence and the tyrant Archelaus. Polus wants the esteem and honor that he gets from gratifying his audience, more than he wants the goods he would obtain through killing and torturing them, but he has not fully reconciled these desires in his own life.54 He desires a certain kind of nonmaterial good that depends on speech and not force. In this sense his own life does at least weakly embody the Socratic principle that “doing injustice is worse than suffering it” because Polus himself doesn’t do the very acts of injustice that he attributes to the tyrant: i.e., killing, stealing, torturing. Instead he devotes himself to the practice of rhetoric that requires some Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 303 kind of mutuality between the speaker and the audience and some kind of devotion to the pleasures of talking and listening to others. The equivocation of goods that is characteristic of Socrates’ definition of the beautiful and shameful is thus both an attempt to wean Polus from his envy of the material goods that the tyrant obtains through force, and an illustration of the fact that the kalon (fine/beautiful/noble) pursuits are linked to the nonmaterial pleasures of speaking and listening, watching, and being watched by others. This however, still leaves the problem of Polus’ perplexity and the equivocation of disjunction characteristic of Socrates’ definitions of the beautiful and the shameful. I now want to explain how these two things are linked together. Socrates’ definitions of the beautiful and the shameful in this section are only potentially disjunctive (and thus also potentially conjunctive): The beautiful is the useful/beneficial or the pleasant or both; the shameful is the harmful or the painful or both. Polus thinks that gratifying or flattering one’s audience is a kalon (fine/beautiful/noble) pursuit, but as Socrates tells Polus, this kind of activity, like cosmetics and cookery, “aims at the pleasant without the best” (Gorgias 465a). In this instance, the kalon activity of delivering speeches is only pleasant (and not beneficial) because it flatters the audiences’ existing prejudices and beliefs without ever suggesting how or why they ought to change. The audience is pleased to have its own prejudices soothed and Polus is honored by them for doing so. Notice too, that if the kalon is identified solely with the mutual pleasures of recognition, then the corresponding notion of to aischron (the shameful/ugly) is identified solely with the pain of misrecognition. For Polus and his audience it is painful and therefore “shameful” to be shown that they don’t live up to these images that they project to each other. In contrast to this, Socrates thinks that the activities of refuting and being refuted are equally pleasant but more beneficial to the one who suffers refutation (Gorgias 458a). This is because having false opinions about the best life is the greatest evil for human beings (Gorgias 458b), and thus being released from them is better than either releasing others or allowing others to retain their false views.55 Thus for Socrates the pleasant and the good do correspond in the kalon experience of elenctic refutation. This correspondence, however, requires a certain activity on the part of the person who is being benefited/refuted. It requires that the person reflect upon his life and the ways in which it differs from the false opinions previously held, and it is precisely this kind of self-reflexive activity that is also alluded to by the equivocation of perspective. It requires that the person move from recognizing the spectator’s perspective to actively recreating his own self-image in 304 Political Theory accordance with or in opposition to this spectator, or in some kind of harmonization of these two things. It thus requires overcoming the desire either to completely remake the world in one’s own image or to remake oneself in the image of the world: i.e., the world as it is constituted in our intersubjective relations with others.56 The correspondence of the beneficial and the pleasant in the experience of the kalon thus requires a certain kind of reflexive and dynamic activity on the part of the dialogue participant and is not guaranteed by simply being shamed by Socrates. The fact that Socrates’ definitions of the beautiful and the shameful are both potentially disjunctive and conjunctive thus reflects the dynamical and indeterminate character of these two phenomena. Their disjunction or conjunction is an achievement and not a given in human life and Polus’ state of perplexity and confusion is evidence of this very fact. If Polus were to see the connection between his love of speechifying and the benefits to himself and the city that a truly noble rhetoric would offer, and if he were to begin to engage in this other kind of rhetoric, then he would be able to apply the conjunctive definition of the beautiful to his own activities. What we have then in the Polus refutation is Plato’s complex illustration of the ways in which the beautiful and shameful entered into the process of conversions or failed conversions that occurred in Socrates’ dialectical exchanges with his interlocutors in democratic Athens. Conclusion: The Aesthetics of Shame as Feeling Our Freedom I now want to address the ways in which the encounter between Polus and Socrates can offer friendly amendments to the “aesthetic” character of political judgment and democratic engagement identified by Zerilli and Panagia. According to Zerilli, one of the things that we can learn about political judgment from Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment is that it involves an imaginative extension or expansion of a concept in an unlimited way: “Every extension of a political concept always involves an imaginative opening up of the world that allows us to see and articulate relations between things that have none (in any necessary, logical sense), to create relations that are external to their terms. Political relations are always external to their terms: they involve not so much the ability to subsume particulars under concepts, but an imaginative element, the ability to see or to forge new connections.”57 The kind of agreement and the sense of necessity that is generated by rhetoric lies in the “images and figures that generate belief.”58 This is not an opposition between the rationality of philosophical Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 305 dialogue and the irrationality of rhetorical exchanges, but rather the difference between two different kinds of rationality, where “rationality” is understood as an “agreement in—a commitment to—patterns or procedures of speaking and acting.”59 To borrow the examples that Zerilli uses to illustrate her point, saying that a political issue like gay marriage or gender equality calls for our judgment is not about foreclosing community, nor is it about the application of a determinate concept like “marriage” to gay couples. It is about expanding the notion of “equality” or “marriage” in new ways and it “requires that we count what we know differently, . . . count nonheteronormative sexual practices as part of the common world, quite apart from whatever social function they might serve.”60 Similarly, the equivocation of goods that I discussed earlier is not meant to trick Polus into agreeing with Socrates’ definition of the beautiful and the shameful so much as it is an attempt to get Polus to expand his concept of what counts as beautiful or shameful “rhetoric” into the new context of the dialogical engagement he is now having with Socrates. The Gorgias as a whole is an attempt to expand the concept of “rhetoric” to include the elements of the noble but painful rhetoric that Socrates describes as one of accusing one’s friends and relatives of injustice rather than simply flattering them (Gorgias 480b7–d9), and that he himself practices on his selfprofessed friend, Polus (Gorgias 473a). But it is also simultaneously an attempt by Plato himself to bring Socratic philosophizing towards the elements of Gorgianic rhetoric that Plato himself thinks are worth preserving: this is the ability of epideictic or display rhetoric to put before the eyes of one’s audience spectacular images and pictures that open up new ways of seeing the world. Hence, I believe that the myth at the end of the Gorgias is itself an attempt by Plato to supply a kind of image or story that supplements, in imagistic form, the logical conclusions that Socrates tries to establish with all of his interlocutors in the dialogical encounters that precede it. If, as Wittgenstein would say, we are held captive by a “picture” then loosening the grip or force that this picture holds over people like Polus and Callicles, requires altering or expanding this picture and not simply showing them that their previous conceptions of themselves or the world are logically problematic. Returning now to the specific situation between Polus and Socrates, I would argue that what Plato dramatizes in their encounter is not just that the production of perplexity can be a salutary moment in our dialogical encounters with others, but also why the Socratic elenchus ultimately failed to convert people like Polus and Callicles. Although Socrates’ shaming of Polus was intended to get him to dynamically and self-reflexively construct 306 Political Theory a deeper kind of consistency or harmony between his love of speeches and his genuine concern for his audience, Polus ends up being confused and perplexed rather than fully convinced by Socrates. There are actually fourteen instances in the entire encounter between Polus and Socrates when Polus reacts by uttering, “So it appears” or “perhaps you make them [their conclusions] agree with the things said before” (Gorgias 474c–480e). As Jonathan Lear puts it, “the problem seems to be that rational argumentation is coming too late” because each of Socrates’ interlocutors has an outlook within which they tend to recognize good and bad arguments.61 The memorable and imagistic myth at the end of the Gorgias is thus both an acknowledgement by Plato that political judgments involve a shifting of the paradigms or pictures that underlie our rational arguments, and also that new paradigms or images take time to infiltrate into one’s psyche because they are competing with the various outlooks that have oriented our lives in the past, and to which our sense of shame is always already attuned. Finally, Plato wants to show us that although Polus’ perplexity indicates that he might be learning something new about himself and the world from Socrates, it also indicates that he is simultaneously aware that he may well have to give up significant elements of the images (i.e., the life of the tyrant or tyrannical democrat) that had previously guided his life. It is these psychological facts about shame that makes the outcome of an encounter that produces it, in one or both of the participants to a dialogical exchange, so uncertain. To return to the kinds of examples that Zerilli uses to illustrate the aesthetic character of political judgments, it becomes clear just why debates about gay marriage, gender equality, or the AIDS epidemic so often lead to outcomes that actually foreclose community and the shared horizon of concern that one or both of the sides is trying to forge. This is because the new pictures being proposed by one group can require that both sides of the debate give up certain other elements of the old pictures that have guided their interactions with the world and with others in the past. One of the primary goals of the ACT-UP movement was to shift the paradigms or patterns for thinking about AIDS from the notion of a “gay plague” to the notion that AIDS is a disease caused by unsafe sexual practices.62 The ACT-UP demonstrations that were meant to perform a reverse shaming of the governments treating the disease as a gay plague, required that all members of the democratic community give up this image or picture that actually gave them a safe refuge from thinking of themselves as susceptible to this “plague.” Of course when AIDS was seen as a gay plague purportedly sent by God to mysteriously afflict gay men and then some high-profile straight men, lesbians actually came to light as God’s chosen people because they Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 307 were the one group who seemed least susceptible to the disease. And indeed the resistances to getting members of this latter community to actually engage in safe-sex practices were in large part due to the conscious or unconscious stickiness of the old paradigm that offered them, as well as members of the straight community, a safe refuge to hide from the real truth about the disease. Similarly gender equality or gay marriage proponents will not succeed in forging new concepts of “marriage” or “equality” unless they deal with many of the same psychological resistances to shame that Plato diagnoses in the Gorgias and that always provide a kind of counterforce to the expansive and transformative possibilities that open up when we respectfully try to shame each other in the public sphere. Plato warns us that when we place things painfully before our eyes in the public sphere, we are all apt to run back into the safe and dark havens of our own respective caves and the images flickering across their walls. While it is certainly true that the external socio-economic positions of various political actors as well as the hegemonic power structures are going to play an important part in determining which groups will tend to react to shame by hiding and which groups will react by transforming their preferences, it is also true that our models and images of political engagement also need to change if we want to prevent the reaction of hiding. Here Plato and Panagia remind us that one of the ways of preventing this reaction is by simply acknowledging the unsettling and perplexing “difficult and tension-filled” character of intersubjectivity in our models of political engagement.63 Polus’ perplexity exemplifies the salutary lack of coherence and simultaneity of contradictory sentiments that Panagia valorizes as a form of democratic engagement in the public sphere. In the moment when we feel ashamed before another we simultaneously feel antipathy towards our former self, now revealed as in some sense inadequate, precisely because we feel some sympathy with the perspective of the other that is judging this self. This can be a good thing if, like Polus, we are somehow erotically attracted to the image of the tyrant and his shameless desire to annihilate or consume rather than listen to and acknowledge the critical gaze of others. As Panagia points out, “The self-reflection that may bring about hatred of ourselves. . . is future oriented in that it fosters a desire to change.”64 Similarly, for Plato, without becoming atopos (strange, wondrous, foul, and distasteful) to ourselves and finding the world itself an atopos place, we are never going to come to new understandings of either our selves or this world. The problem with Panagia’s criticism of Habermas, though, is that he tends to treat unsettledness or lack of coherence as a virtue opposed to the virtue of sincerity, but the real opposites of sincerity are the vices of pretentiousness, 308 Political Theory self-deception, flattery, hypocrisy, and deceit. This is what Habermas and Plato are primarily worried about, not unsettledness. The problem for Plato and Habermas is that these vices can actually involve a false kind of coherence: i.e., we mistakenly think we are, or intentionally pretend to be, completely captured by the images or representations of ourselves that we initially present to others in the public sphere. Socrates’ elenctic encounters with others in Athens were in fact intended to puncture and disrupt these sorts of conscious deceits and unconscious pretenses that made the many false or untruthful witnesses both inside and outside the deliberative democratic assembly. For Plato and Habermas, truthfulness or sincerity involves far more than the willingness to utter one’s pre-deliberative preferences, rather it also involves the much more difficult willingness to acknowledge the new selves and others that may come to light through the processes of dialectical engagement or democratic deliberation. Notes 1. It is important to note that these theorists use the term “aesthetic” in a much broader sense than it was first used by Alexander Baumgarten in “Reflections on Certain Matters Relating to Poetry” in 1735. Baumgarten used the term to denote the “science of perception” or the sphere of sensory cognition in contrast to the more general and abstract forms of intellectual cognition. Political theorists who now speak about the aesthetic aspects of politics focus on topics ranging from sensuous perception, taste, beauty, disinterestedness, the imagination, mimesis, performativity, representation, fictionality, etc. It is also important to note that these aesthetic critics of Habermas do not conflate the aestheticization of politics with the subjectivism characteristic of either Romantic or Nietzschean aestheticism. Both Zerilli and Panagia focus on intersubjective aesthetic practices that involve the publicly available aspects of representation within a democratic public sphere. For the argument that Arendt’s aesthetics involves a rejection of the subjectivism of Nietzschean aestheticism see Dana Villa, “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action,” Political Theory 20 (1992), 274-308; Lawrence J. Biskowski, “Politics versus Aesthetics: Arendt’s Critique of Nietzsche and Heidegger,” The Review of Politics 57 (1995), 55-89. 2. Linda Zerilli, “We Feel our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33 (2005), 164. 3. Ibid., 171. 4. Ibid., 171. 5. Davide Panagia, “The Force of Political Argument,” Political Theory 32 (2004), 830. 6. Panagia, “The Force of Political Argument,” 832. 7. Ibid., 834. 8. Panagia focuses primarily on the essays of William Hazlitt, but also discusses Montaigne and Adorno’s notions of the essay. 9. Ibid., 837-841. 10. Ibid., 838. 11. Ibid., 840. Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 309 12. Ibid., 840. 13. As Panagia points out many contemporary thinkers have focused on the interconnections between politics and aesthetics as a resource for thinking about political critique and judgment: Amanda Anderson, F. R. Ankersmit, Jane Bennett, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Bill Connolly, Frances Ferguson, Stanley Fish, Richard Flathman, Michael Fried, John Guillory, Bonnie Honig, Steven Knapp, Kirstie McClure, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, Jacques Rancière and Mort Schoolman. See Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), no. 7, 126. I would add Kennan Ferguson, Patchen Markell, and Dana Villa to this list. 14. Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom,” 166. This aspect of the political character of Arendt’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment is also stressed by Kennan Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Lexington Books, 1999), 7-8; Biskowski, “Politics versus Aesthetics,” 65; Villa, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 295. 15. Arendt admits to feeling ashamed of her humanity in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 234. She also argues that one of the most problematic aspects of Germany in the aftermath of the Nazi regime was the heartlessness and absence of emotions like shame. See Hannah Arendt, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,” Commentary 10 (1950), 342. Both of these citations are from Volker Heins, “Reasons of the Heart: Weber and Arendt on Emotions in Politics,” forthcoming in European Legacy 12 (2007). 16. Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 4. 17. The translation is by Paul Shorey, Plato: The Republic: Books VI-X (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994). The reference is to the Stephanus pages. 18. This proverb is quoted by Aristotle in the Rhetoric at 1384a18. 19. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 531. 20. One of my central arguments in “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Contemporary Politics of Shame,” Political Theory 32 (2004), 468-494 was that it is necessary to distinguish between the moment when a person feels shame before another (the occurrent experience of shame) and the moment when the person reacts to this feeling in any number of different ways and actually develops a sense of shame that disposes him to avoid what he first judged to be shameful about the initial experience. 21. I borrow this term from the title of Zerilli’s article. 22. Christina Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” 479. 23. See E. R. Dodds, Gorgias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 30-34; Charles Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51-55. 24. See for example Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 138. 25. Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57 (1990), 73-103, 73. I borrow this citation from Biskowski, “Politics versus Aesthetics,” 68. 26. Christina Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Politics of Shame,” Forthcoming from Princeton University Press, 2008. 27. Paul Nieuwenburg, “Learning to Deliberate: Aristotle on Truthfulness and Public Deliberation,” Political Theory 32 (2004), 449-467; Bernard Yack, “Rhetoric and Public Reasoning: An Aristotelian Understanding of Political Deliberation,” Political Theory 34 (2006), 417-438. 310 Political Theory 28. The Gorgias initially depicts dialectical exchanges between Socrates, Gorgias, Polus and Callicles, but when Callicles refuses to continue the conversation, Socrates proceeds to carry the argument forward with a bizarre conversation with himself (Gorgias 506c-509c) and then finally ends it all with a myth (Gorgias 523a-527e). Second, at different moments within each of the dialectical encounters Socrates gets his interlocutors to consider how the others who are actually present or an imaginary Athenian audience would view their remarks. Finally, there are important interruptions into the conversation made by those who had been silent witnesses deliberating with themselves as they watched the conversation go on between others (Gorgias 497b). 29. The fact that shame can make someone change his or her premises is what makes it such an important emotion for deliberative democratic theory. 30. I develop this point much more fully in “Plato on Shame and Frank Speech in Democratic Athens,” in Politics and the Passions in the History of Political Thought, ed. Rebecca Kingston and Leonard Ferry (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, forthcoming 2007). I borrow the terms “civic self image” and “normative imagery” from Sara Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements (Princeton University Press, 2000) 3-18; see especially no. 26, 12. 31. For a much fuller treatment of the democratic practice of parrhe-sia see Sara Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements; Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001); Arlene Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 32. All translations of the Gorgias are from James Nichols Jr., Plato: Gorgias (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). All references are to the Stephanus pages. 33. Both of these assertions are developed at much greater length in my forthcoming book. 34. Christina Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” 485-486. 35. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). 36. Charles Kahn, “Drama and Dialectic in Plato’s Gorgias,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy I (1983), 75-121; Richard McKim, “Shame and Truth in Plato’s Gorgias,” in Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings (New York: Routledge, 1988), 34-48. 37. Kahn, “Drama and Dialectic,” 117. 38. McKim (“Shame and Truth,” 40) first describes this as what differentiates Socrates’ understanding of shame from Callicles: “Whereas Callicles says that men assert out of shame what they really believe to be false, Socrates thinks that they assert out of shame what they really believe to be true; . . .”. He then goes on to apply this understanding of shame in his explanation of the Polus refutation. 39. Kahn, “Drama and Dialectic,” 115. 40. Liddell and Scott, A Greek English Lexicon, 272. 41. E. R. Dodds, Gorgias, 249; Gregory Vlastos, “Does Socrates Cheat?” in Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 144; Gerasimos Santas, Socrates’ Philosophy in Plato’s Early Dialogues (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 239; Kahn, “Drama and Dialectic,” 91-92. 42. Vlastos tries to show this by consistently making an individual spectator the judge of whether something is painful or pleasant to behold. See Vlastos, “Does Socrates Cheat?” 142-143. (This is an updated version of his earlier article, “Was Polus Refuted?” in Studies in Greek Philosophy, Ed. Daniel Graham, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995: 60-64.) This demonstration is less successful than the ones by Dodds and Santas that rely on consistently making the community the judge of the usefulness or harmfulness of beautiful acts. See Dodds, Gorgias, 249; Santas, Socrates’ Philosophy, 239. Tarnopolsky / Deliberative Democracy 311 43. Socrates of course rejects this retaliatory form of punishment precisely because he believes it is unjust to harm anyone. 44. As Socrates tells Gorgias, “And of what men am I one? Those who are refuted with pleasure if I say something not true, and who refute with pleasure if someone should say something not true – and indeed not with less pleasure to be refuted that to refute. For I consider it a greater good, to the extent that it is a greater good to be released oneself from the greatest evil than to release another (Gorgias 458a).” 45. According to Gerasimos Santas, “Socrates believes that an adequate definition must answer the following four things: What is the kind (characteristic, property) which (a) is the same (common) in all F things, and (b) is that by reason of which all F things are F, and (c) is that by which F things do not differ and (d) is that which in all F things one calls ‘the F’?” See Santas, Socrates’ Philosophy, 104. Contra Santas, I believe that the Gorgias is a transitional dialogue and I place it between the early and middle dialogues of Plato. This is why the definitions of the beautiful and shameful do not conform to the same logical strictures as the early Socratic dialogues. This is also why I partially disagree with one of my anonymous reviewers. This reviewer argues that for Plato bad things are always shameful, whereas many people can be ashamed of good things like generosity and many people can consider immoral acts to be beautiful, so there is a danger to aestheticizing politics. This is certainly true, but I think that this is just what Plato wants to correct in the Socratic understanding of shame which overlooks the fact that quite often people fixate only on the painful aspects of shame and the pleasant aspects of beauty and then orient their lives around these partial interpretations of shame and beauty. 46. Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted,” 74. 47. Zerilli (“We Feel our Freedom,” 164-5) nicely brings this to light in her interpretation of Arendt and Kant: Political engagement and intersubjective judgments simultaneously reveals “who one is” while they reveal the “world”, and both of these creations do not exist prior to the communicative interaction. 48. John M. Cooper, “Reason, Virtue, Moral Value,” in Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 263. 49. Cooper, “Reason, Virtue, Moral Value,” 273. 50. Zerilli (“We Feel our Freedom,” 176) argues that the unique perspective or position from which political judgments take place is one of outsideness: “It is this third perspective that Arendt has in mind when she said that imaginative visiting involves not the mutual understanding of ‘one another as individual persons’, but the understanding that involves coming to ‘see the same world from one another’s standpoint,’ to ‘see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects’.” 51. I stressed these various possible reactions to the occurrent experience of shame in “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” 478, 487. This is why I disagree with the accounts of shame offered by Martha Nussbaum and Jon Elster that stress the reaction of hiding as the primary action consequence of shame. See Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 153. 52. Thus although I agree with Nieuwenburg’s argument (“Learning to Deliberate,” 463) that shame can have a role to play in making us more sincere deliberators who develop a genuine concern for the common good that was originally not part of our pre-deliberative preferences, I disagree with him that shame always has this “direction of fit” towards the common good. This is because we can develop a sense of shame that focuses on the painful rather than the beneficial aspects of the occurrent experience of shame and that then compels us towards the reactions of hiding from or flattering the common good. 312 Political Theory 53. See also Kahn, “Drama and Dialectic,” 95. This spectator view of human action was evident not only in Polus’ estimation of his own actions but also in his judgment of the actions of others. His speech about Archelaus was grounded, not in any personal experience of tyranny, but rather in a projection of the conventional views of justice and injustice onto the external actions of a person. In this speech the just and unjust were totally conventional: Archelaus was a slave by birth and therefore to remain just, according to Polus, he should have remained a slave (Gorgias 471a5). It was Socrates and not Polus who said that he would have to talk with Archelaus in order to determine whether or not he was just and happy (Gorgias 470d1). 54. As Paul Nieuwenburg (“Learning to Deliberate,” 460-461) has argued with respect to Aristotle, the person who has a sense of shame that attunes him to endoxa (i.e., reputable or honorable propositions held by all, the many or the wise) and who desires esteem is morally superior to a person who has no shame and who admires things like money because the former is at least potentially able to acquire a sincere desire for the common good. 55. Note too that in this sense Socrates hopes to become a patient of the very people he incessantly questions, because he hopes that this questioning will help to release him from his own false opinions. The activity of Socratic elenchus requires the willingness of both parties to reciprocally take up the position of agent and patient, speaker and listener. 56. Polus is oriented to maintaining the “alien beauty” that arises from continually remaking oneself over in accordance with the spectator’s perspective, whereas the tyrant is oriented to eradicating this perspective altogether by remaking the world in his own image. 57. Zerilli, “We Feel our Freedom,” 180. 58. Ibid., 167. 59. Ibid., 169. Zerilli is here quoting Stephen Mulhall’s interpretation of Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Kant’s Third Critique. 60. Ibid., 183. 61. Jonathan Lear, “Allegory and Myth in Plato’s Republic,” in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic, ed. Gerasimos Santas (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 25-43, 25. 62. As Andrea Densham notes, the first public awareness of the AIDS pandemic came in 1981 in the form of an “obscure public health bulletin published by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta [that] first reported that five young men – ‘all active homosexuals’ – had contracted a very rare pneumonia, the cause of which was entirely unknown.” See Andreas Densham, “Introduction – Politics as a Cause and Consequence of the AIDS Pandemic,” Perspectives on Politics 4 (2006), 641-646, 641. 63. Biskowski (“Politics versus Aesthetics,” 61) argues that this tension is precisely what an Arendtian account of the public sphere is concerned to emphasize. 64. Panagia, “The Force of Political Argument,” 841. Christina Tarnopolsky is an assistant professor of political science at McGill University. She is author of the book, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, entitled Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Politics of Shame. She is also currently at work on a manuscript provisionally entitled Perspectives on Aesthetic Politics: Plato, Nietzsche and Foucault.