LES QUALITÉS DU CONSEILLER: SAVOIR, BIENVEILLANCE, FRANC-PARLER (PLATON, GORGIAS, 486 E 6-487 D 7)

The Gorgias plays a main part to precise the Socratic and Platonician conception of the adviser (sumboulos). The qualities which Socrates attributes, ironically, to Callicles: knowledge (epistêmê), good will (eunoia) and frank speech (parrhêsia) must be considered as the qualities of the philosopher in so far as he is the authentic adviser. As a matter of fact, these qualities are opposed to the characteristics of the rhetor’s and the public man’s souls: skillful in conjecturing (stokhastikê), manly (andreia) and naturally tough in human relations (phusei deinê prosomilein tois anthrôpois), characteristics which Callicles brings into contrast with the portrait he paints of Socrates, as a man of privacy, lacking manliness. This passage of the Gorgias finds, besides, an echo in Aristotle’s treatises: the Rhetoric (book II) and the Nicomachean Ethics (book VI).