Abstract

The dramatic and thematic attention to shame in Plato's Gorgias invites readers to examine the relation between the Greek experience of shame [aidos, aischune] and philosophical logos, especially as the latter is presented in the Socratic practice of dialegesthai. My dissertation examines this relation both within Plato's dialogues, especially in the Gorgias, Apology, Crito and Republic, and without, as I draw upon phenomenological and psychoanalytic theories of shame and anthropological studies of so-called "shame-cultures" to explicate the sense of shame animating Plato's texts. Central to my interpretation of Plato is the focus on dramatic features of the dialogues as decisive for their philosophical meaning. ;The results of this examination point to a number of important philosophical consequences that Socrates accomplishes dramatically through shame. First, he undermines the Gorgianic conception of rhetoric as a vehicle of political domination, and he exposes the orator's soul as that of a panderer, a servant of the audience. Second, the shame experienced by Gorgias and the other interlocutors comes to light as an attunement to social power-relations, and also as an attunement to one's own integrity, one's agreement with oneself as disclosed in logos. Third, the integrity targeted by shame is shown to be socially-constituted, so that one's susceptibility to feeling shame when subjected to elenchos is symptomatic of a specific community of pleasures and pains. Fourth, shame is revealed to operate as a skopos, a watchman carrying out a vigil over the souls of individuals in society, thereby precluding the possibility of the concealment fantasized as the ring of Gyges. In this way, shame does the work of preserving the social order of friendship and community, and because it does this work in dialegesthai, Socratic dialectic can lay claim to being politike techne. When we piece together these philosophical consequences of shame, it is clear not only that shame is philosophically significant, but also that the Socrates who uses shame within his elenctic art of dialegesthai is captivating and disturbing in a way to which most interpretations fail to do justice