How one should live
SocratesLet us recall, then, what I happened to be saying, in my turn, to Polus and Gorgias. For I was saying, again, if you remember, that there are preparations, some reaching only as far as pleasure, preparing just this and nothing else, and ignorant of the better and the worse, and others knowing what is good and what is bad. And among those concerned with pleasures I placed cooking, which is experience and not an art, and among those concerned with the good, the art of medicine.
And for the sake of the god of friendship, Callicles, don’t you yourself think that you may joke with me, and don’t answer whatever comes to you against what seems true to you; nor, again, take what comes from me as if I were joking. For you see that our discussion is about the thing that anyone with even a little sense would take most seriously: how one should live—whether the life you invite me to, doing, if you please, these things of a real man, speaking before the people and practising rhetoric and engaging in politics in the way you now engage in politics, or this life here, the life in philosophy, and in what exactly this one differs from that. Perhaps, then, it is best, as I tried to do just now, to divide them, and, having divided them and come to agreement with each other on whether these really are two lives, to examine how they differ from each other and which of the two one should live. Well, perhaps you don’t yet know what I mean.
CalliclesNo indeed.