Plato’s Academy as depicted on tiles found at Pompeii, which dates to circa 100 BC.

1,826 words

Part 11 of 14 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here, Part 8 here, Part 9 here, Part 10 here, Part 12 here)

After beating Polus, Socrates continued to badger him with intentionally provocative and paradoxical arguments until Callicles cuts in. The conversation between Socrates and Callicles takes up the rest of the Gorgias.

At first, Callicles does not speak directly to Socrates. Instead, he turns to Socrates’ friend Chaerephon and says, “Tell me, Chaerephon, is Socrates serious about this, or is he joking?” To which Chaerephon says, “I think he’s dead serious about this, Callicles. There’s nothing like asking him though.” Again, the dramatic detail of turning to Socrates’ student before Socrates himself underscores the problem of the teacher-student relationship, which is a version of the deeper metaphysical issue of the relationship of the original to the copy.

Callicles is a vivid, well-drawn character. He could have been a real person. There is no evidence for his existence outside of Plato’s Gorgias, but that doesn’t necessarily prove anything, given that very few ancient historical records have survived.

Callicles presents himself as thoroughly shameless and unscrupulous. But in fact he has a number of intellectual virtues. Indeed, he’s the most philosophical of Socrates’ three interlocutors.

First, Callicles is tough-minded. He realizes that in order to defend the idea that might is right, one has to overturn all conventional notions of right and wrong. Gorgias doesn’t see this. He thinks he is teaching people how to get ahead while leaving the received moral order intact. Polus thinks he is free of traditional morals, but he is mistaken. He will not say that doing injustice is bad. But he still thinks it is shameful, which is how Socrates defeats him.

Second, Callicles is a daring thinker. He’s not bound by convention. That’s  a prerequisite for being truly philosophical. No matter how much lip service one might feel it prudent to pay to reigning conventions, one can’t let them inside. One can’t let them impede one’s thinking. Callicles has liberated his mind to a greater degree than Gorgias and Polus from purely conventional notions of justice.

One sign of Callicles’ emancipation from convention is his outspokenness, which Socrates praises. Callicles will say things that he thinks are true, even if they might damage his reputation. Despite his wealth and polish, there is something ungentlemanly about Callicles which verges on Socrates’ own boorishness.

Third, the flipside of Callicles’ emancipation from convention is his concern about nature, specifically what’s right by nature. The first known usage of the phrase “law of nature” or “right by nature” (“nomon . . . physeos”) appears in the Gorgias in the mouth of Callicles (483e). Thus Callicles isn’t a completely amoral person. He is only amoral by conventional standards. But he upholds nature as a standard.  On this basis, he argues for the admirability of the life the sophists teach: the public life of pursuing freedom for oneself through power over others, the paradigm of which is the tyrant.

Socrates has no quarrel with Callicles’ tough-mindedness, unconventionality, outspokenness, and appeal to nature. But Socrates argues that the idea of natural right leads to a very different life than the one Callicles defends. It is the life of the philosopher, not the tyrant.

Callicles turns to Socrates and says:

Tell me Socrates, are we to take you as being serious now or joking? For if you are serious, and these things you’re saying are really true [namely that it is better to suffer injustice than to do it], won’t this human life of ours be turned upside down? And won’t everything we do evidently be the opposite of what we should do?

Socrates replies:

Callicles, if human beings didn’t share common experiences, some sharing one, others sharing another, but one of us had some unique experience not shared by others, it wouldn’t be easy for him to communicate what he experienced to the other. I say this because I realize that you and I are both now actually sharing a common experience. Each of us is a lover of two objects, I of Alcibiades, Cleinius’ son, and of philosophy. And you of the demos [the Greek word for the people of Athens] and the Demos who’s the son of Pyrilampes. [Pyrilampes was Plato’s stepfather, and so Demos was Plato’s stepbrother.] I notice that in each case you’re unable to contradict your beloved.

We’re getting a sense of who Callicles is. He’s in love with the people, which means that he wants to rule the people. To rule the people, he flatters them. This goes back to the distinction between rhetoric as flattery, which panders and corrupts by telling people what they want to hear, as opposed to the true political art, which builds the people up, and which sometimes means telling them things that they need to hear but don’t want to hear. If the people change their minds, Callicles must change his mind to please them. Thus Callicles not only corrupts the people, he corrupts himself in the bargain. Moreover, he has the same sort of mutually corrupting relationship with his boyfriend.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

This is not a very flattering picture of Callicles. He’s a people pleaser, who puts the good opinion of others over pursuing and holding fast to the truth. Most politicians and public figures  are people pleasers, which means they are willing to overthrow solid principles or affirm absolutely deadly ones because it pleases the person they’re speaking to in the moment.

Because Callicles is a panderer, he thinks that Socrates is the same way. But he couldn’t be more mistaken. For Socrates loves philosophy, and philosophy, unlike the people of Athens, is not fickle. The public is the realm of opinion, and opinion is always shifting and changing. Philosophy is the pursuit of truth, which is unchanging. Philosophy says the same things over and over, whereas the public is constantly changing its mind. The love of truth makes Socrates grounded and internally consistent. The love of the public makes Callicles internally contradictory.

The same dynamic is present in the personal relationships of Callicles and Socrates. Callicles is in love with Demos, the son of Pyrilampes, whom he pursues through flattery. This flattery means adopting Demos’ shifting opinions as slavishly as Callicles adopts the opinions of the Athenian demos. Thus Callicles corrupts both Demos and himself. (The fact that Demos was the stepbrother of Plato, combined with the vividness of his depiction of Callicles, inclines me to think that the Platonic character of Callicles is based on a real person.)

Socrates, however, has a very different relationship with Alcibiades, as we have seen in the Alcibiades I. There is no question that Socrates flatters Alcibiades at first, appealing to his grandiose self-image and aspirations. But once Socrates has Alcibiades’ attention, he systematically tries to lead him away from tyranny toward philosophy. This is edification, not flattery; friendship, not corruption. It is essentially the same path that Socrates tries to lead Callicles down, which is why the two dialogues go together so well.

Socrates claims that “It is better to suffer injustice than to do it” is not a Socratic opinion. It is a philosophical truth. Socrates then challenges Callicles to refute, not Socrates, but philosophy herself:

. . . either refute her and show that doing what’s unjust without paying what is due for it is not the ultimate of all bad things, as I just now was saying it is. Or else, if you leave this unrefuted, then by the dog the god of the Egyptians, Callicles, Callicles will not agree with you Callicles, but will be dissonant with you all your life long. And yet for my part, my good man, I think it’s better to have my lyre or a chorus that I might lead out of tune and dissonant, and to have the vast majority of men disagree with me and contradict me, than to be out of harmony with myself,  though I’m only one person.

Notice that Socrates is making a speech, a wonderful speech at that. When he was talking to Gorgias and Polus, he insisted on short answers to his questions. Now he is giving speeches, and Callicles matches him in kind. Later, the dialogue form returns. But then it breaks down again when Callicles lapses into sullen silence. Then we are treated to the farce of Socrates having a dialogue with himself. Finally, the Gorgias ends with Socrates spinning a myth about the underworld.

As in the beginning of the conversation with Polus, Plato is underscoring the limits of speech, both rhetoric and philosophical reasoning. In the conversation with Gorgias, it became clear that people need to be informed and intelligent to talk about philosophy. With the uniformed and unintelligent, rhetoric has the advantage. In the conversation with Polus, Socrates made it clear that speeches are ineffective if nobody will listen to them. The same, however, is true of philosophy. Now Callicles will demonstrate that dialogue is ineffective if nobody will answer. Where reason is ineffective, rhetoric and myth take their place.

The myth at the end of the Gorgias is foreshadowed by Socrates’ oath. Earlier, he has sworn an oath “by the dog.” One might take this as a profane oath or a euphemism, somewhat analogous to “doggone it,” as opposed to “Goddammit.” So now Socrates makes it clear that he is swearing “by the dog, the god of the Egyptians.” This is probably a reference to Anubis, the jackal-headed god who leads souls to the underworld for judgment, which is the topic of the closing myth.

Now we come to the idea of harmony. There are two senses of harmony here.

On the surface, it simply means having non-contradictory beliefs. If you follow the crowd and adopt opinions because they please the people around you, your mind is going to be a junk heap of contradictory opinions, because the people are contradictory. They contradict one another. They contradict themselves from one minute to the next. And if you’re trying to pursue their good opinion rather than pursue the truth, you’re going to be full of contradictions as well.

You can call consistency of belief harmony of the mind. But the deeper harmony is the harmony of the soul, which has to do with virtue, and which is spiritual health. There is more to the soul than just the mind, although in the Gorgias, Socrates doesn’t introduce the tripartite division of the soul that appears in the Republic; he distinguished between the soul and the body and also between reason and desire.

To pursue inner harmony of the mind, and harmony within the soul as a whole, it often requires disharmony with the people around you, because most people, most of the time, are intellectually sloppy and morally lax. So if you harmonize with them, you’re going to be out of harmony with yourself, both intellectually and morally.