Rhetoric: Art and Pseudo-Art in Plato's Gorgias

In this article, I shall claim that Plato is one of the first, if not the first, to indentify the problematic nature of the teacher-pupil relationship in everything to do with art and pseudo-art. In Plato's time, there were those who regarded the existence of pupils, and particularly a large group of pupils, as sufficient for regarding the teacher as an artist and the subject taught as an art. The ways in which the pupils were "acquired"-whether through the knowledge and expertise of the teacher in his field or his knowledge and expertise in attracting pupils-do not seem to have been clearly distinguished. Plato understands that this lack of distinction is due to the rise of rhetoric, which turns the incidental characteristics of a real art, such as the teacher-student relationship, into criteria for judging something to be an art. Plato fought against rhetoric and what it represented-the presentation of appearance as reality-in a unique way. A dramatic analysis of the Gorgias reveals that the pupils of Gorgias are presented as unwittingly revealing rhetoric to be a pseudo-art.