At a moment when it is has unfortunately become necessary to tax anglophone Plato scholarship with linguistic parochialism (cf. the last paragraph of R. Granieri's review of J. Moss; BMCR 2021.12.02), it is a delight to turn to K.'s polished and brilliant book on Plato's Gorgias. In outward appearance, K.'s is typical of the perfunctorily published German doctoral dissertation; at the same time, in its conceptual originality, literary elegance and above all in its learned attention to a wide range of anglophone scholarship, it is unusual, if not unique. Instead of reading Gorgias in relation to ‘the insufficiency of reason’ model that configures a newly pessimistic Plato abandoning Socratic intellectualism for myth and the tripartite soul, K. demonstrates convincingly that the verbal attacks on Socrates from Polus and Callicles reveal that the Socratic elenchus is succeeding. It demonstrably succeeds because those verbal attacks, far from revealing the unpersuadable intransigence of Socrates’ interlocutors, arise rather from the cognitive dissonance within their souls. By leading them into involuntary self-contradiction, Socrates’ elenctic therapy – on the model of medicine and jurisprudence – is designed to elicit this dissonance and its inevitably emotional results. While giving equal time to German scholars such as M. Erler, P. Stemmer and T.A. Szlezák, K.'s underlying Fragestellung owes more to G. Vlastos, C.H. Kahn and G. Klosko, as well as to J. Beversluis, R. Woolf and R.G. Edmonds. In short, this is a German book that all anglophone students of Plato's Gorgias will need to read.
The book consists of five chapters, of which the third is the most important. After a sizzling introduction, K. juxtaposes Gorgias with Apology of Socrates in Chapter 2 with respect to the verbal attacks on Socrates that will become his theme in Chapter 3. What makes the introduction sizzle is that K. depicts the scholarly consensus that the elenchus fails in Gorgias – the position he will reject – as the great exception to the interpretative dissonance engendered by Plato's dialogues. In short, K. announces his originality and audacity at the start while preserving the outward appearance of a well-researched doctoral dissertation. The fourth chapter takes its start from Socrates’ claim that Callicles possesses intelligence, outspokenness and goodwill (Grg. 487a2–3) and demonstrates, primarily by way of a lengthy discussion of Socratic irony (pp. 152–208), that Socrates is in full possession of these dialectical virtues. (Among more recent German scholarship, K. is most conspicuously indebted to R. Geiger, Dialektische Tugenden: Untersuchungen zur Gesprächsform in den Platonischen Dialogen [2006].) It is Socrates’ intelligent temperance that allows him not to repay in kind the verbal attacks on him, and K.'s gentler version of irony serves the purpose of keeping even apparently intransigent interlocutors like Polus and Callicles engaged long enough to take their slow-acting and painfully punitive medicine, administered by Socrates through the elenchus for their own good, in full accord with Socratic εὐνοία. A brief final summary not only recapitulates the whole but more fully justifies the juxtaposition of Apology and Gorgias than Chapter 2 had done.
The crucial claim in Chapter 3 is that Socrates’ elenctic medicine, difficult to administer and painful to receive, is necessarily slow-acting. In seeking to rid Callicles in particular of his cognitive dissonance – and K.'s use of psychology is striking and effective throughout –, Socrates does not and cannot expect instantaneous results (pp. 111–17). Therefore, instead of reading Callicles’ intemperate verbal attacks on Socrates as proof either of his ultimate intransigence, his proto-Nietzschean insight, or of the ineffectiveness of the Socratic elenchus in the face of resolute and irrational immoralism, K. fully justifies the dialogue's ubiquitous medical and judicial metaphors as a means to show why Socratic therapy, necessarily both painful and punitive, requires time and repetition to produce its life-altering effects. K. repeatedly upholds both Socrates’ effectiveness and Plato's artistry, the latter by refusing to allow the elenchus to produce immediate and painless results. There are in fact dozens of passages in Gorgias that K. illuminates in a fresh and insightful manner, but one of the most striking justifies his book's title (pp. 123–4): it is only through an ongoing fight and battle that the Socratic elenchus can truly succeed, and, by beginning with the words Streit und Kampf (Grg. 447a1), Plato's Gorgias authenticates in practice the way of life that Socrates famously defends on a theoretical basis in the Apology. After sampling K.'s 2017 article (‘Argumentativ überwunden, aber nicht überzeugt? Zur Wirksamkeit der Sokratischen Elenktik in Platons Gorgias’, Graeco-Latina Brunensia 22 [2017], 229–40), every scholar interested in the relationship between Plato and Socrates will need to read and weigh the central chapter of K.'s Streit und Kampf.
Like the overly deflationary section on ‘Die Politikmetaphor’ in Chapter 3 – unfortunately, K. mentions neither Aelius Aristides nor Aristides the Just (Grg. 526a3–b4) –, the second and fourth chapters are less effective. The last sentence of the fifth, thanks to the contrast between Rechtfertigung and Beglaubigung (p. 228), should have appeared at the start of the second. Moreover, since K. is evidently steeped in the writings of C.H. Kahn, he might have addressed what the latter called ‘my heresy’ (i.e. that Gorgias, like Apology, is a compositionally early dialogue, and thus they share the same theme; see C.H. Kahn, ‘Did Plato Write Socratic Dialogues?’ CQ 31 [1981], 305–20, on p. 310) while effectively joining the ‘justification’ in the one with the ‘authentication’ provided in the other. As for the fourth chapter, K.'s lengthy discussion of Socratic irony is vitiated by a failure to consider with his typical care the context of the passage that gave rise to that discussion. While recasting Socratic irony effectively as benevolent and medicinal, K. must regard Socrates’ attribution to Callicles of the three dialectical virtues – intelligence, outspokenness and benevolence – as ironic and sincerely applicable only to Socrates (pp. 184–5). To be clear, the entire discussion of irony arises from K.'s attempt to illustrate Socrates’ benevolence, which he does after illustrating his intelligence and παρρησία. This leads him to regard Socrates’ unique claim that Callicles is a godsend and touchstone (Grg. 486d1–7) as traditionally and dismissively ironic (pp. 133–4), and thus precludes the possible punchline that K.'s brilliant third chapter has long since begun preparing the sympathetic reader to entertain and perhaps accept: that despite his truculent silence and the end of the dialogue and his verbal aggressions within it, Callicles was ultimately if painfully converted by Socrates and acquired as a result the capacity for unflinching self-accusation that distinguishes the proper use of rhetoric (Grg. 480b8–d6). To have mooted such a possibility would have made K.'s book even more kaiserlich.
Some comment on K.'s German is requisite. He not only writes with intelligent elegance but does so in a manner that repeatedly tested the limits of this reviewer's vocabulary. In one of his most insightful observations K. notes that judicial metaphors are paradoxically linked to the notion of cure while the medicinal ones repeatedly evoke the language of punishment (p. 82); he uses the word Verschränkung to describe perfectly this intermeshed relationship; for this word, and for many others, I needed to consult my Wörterbuch. The result is amazing: this is a very German book written by a promising young scholar who uses his native language with skill and evident delight, making no effort to accommodate the linguistic sensibilities or limitations of an anglophone audience – as L.-A. Dorion once told me that L. Brisson had advised him to do while writing French –, who nevertheless has fully digested and addressed virtually all of the relevant anglophone literature on the subject both intelligently and critically (including D. Sedley [pp. 75–9], M.M. McCabe [p. 79] and C. Rowe [pp. 79–81]. E. Austin's ‘Corpses, Self-Defense, and Immortality: Callicles’ Fear of Death in the Gorgias’, Ancient Philosophy 33 [2013], 33–52, is an exception). All students of Plato have every good reason to expect great things from an author who has already managed to teach us something about both German and anglophone scholarship while defending with equal skill both Socrates and Plato.
