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The Unbridled Tongue: Plato, Parrhesia, and Philosophy7 1reveal his most intimate thoughts. By appealing to Gorgias’s pride, Socrates istrying to lure him into freely joining the camp of those who see being refutedas a beautiful occasion for learning, instead of as a great insult and sourceof shame. Thus, with the help of a certain deception, Socrates makes Gorgiascommit himself to continuing the conversation before he realizes whyhe might not want to be a part of it. The ruse is successful: Gorgias claimsloudly that he is one of those individuals dedicated to the cause of truth, andhence that he is capable of accepting criticism. While this ruse will not initself suffice to convert Gorgias to (Platonic) philosophy, Socrates’s subtlemanipulation does succeed in delaying and perhaps even in circumscribingGorgias’s exasperation. Flattery allows Socrates to keep a minimum of goodwill on the part of Gorgias and thus to have in him an ally when violencelater erupts. 24 Flattery also plays an important role in the fiery exchanges thatfollow between Socrates and Callicles (489b, 494c, 492d). But Callicles is notas blind to Socrates’s stratagem as Gorgias: after having been described asthe “noblest of men” (521b), Callicles retorts testily that Socrates is slavishlygiving in to the demands of flattery. Naturally, the cold response of Calliclesfails to convince Socrates to give up on his strategy: the dialogue is pepperedwith irony until the very end. It reaches a pinnacle when Socrates informs histhree interlocutors—after having laid bare the limits of their knowledge—that they are the “wisest of the Greeks of today” (527a).Particularly intense if not outright violent, the exchanges that take placehere between Callicles and Socrates have been the object of much discussion.It will suffice for my specific purpose here to note that Foucault and Monosonboth derive from these heated exchanges important lessons regarding parrhesia(it is here, after all, that Socrates explicitly identifies parrhesia as one ofthe prerequisites for philosophy). After having lost Gorgias and Polus as conversationpartners, Socrates exclaims that he is quite pleased to have Calliclesas his next interlocutor. Socrates remarks that Callicles has all that is neededto engage in a philosophical conversation: “a person who is going to put asoul to an adequate test to see whether it lives rightly or not must have threequalities, all of which you have: knowledge [epistēmē], good will [eunoia], andfrankness [parrhēsia]” (487a). Faced with this significant passage, some Platointerpreters have taken Socrates at his word and concluded that Callicles isindeed an individual who is truly capable of parrhesia. 25 But it is unconvinc-24Later in the dialogue (497b), Gorgias will try to help Socrates convince Callicles of the need tocontinue the conversation.25Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements, 163. Compare with Josiah Ober, Political Dissent inDemocratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 203. The position of Foucault is