Notes on Plato’s Gorgias, Part 12
Right by Convention vs. Right by Nature

Socrates: a good 5 cent cigar

1,837 words

Part 12 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 11 here, Part 13 here)

The Speech of Callicles

Socrates has delivered a scathing indictment of Callicles as a man who wishes to lead the people, but in fact slavishly follows them by pandering to their shifting whims. But Callicles is not cowed. In fact, he responds with an indictment of his own, in the form of a brilliant speech, which falls into two parts.

Callicles begins by turning the tables on Socrates. He accuses Socrates of grandstanding to the crowd. Socrates, not Callicles, is the real people pleaser.

When Socrates questioned Gorgias, he caught him in a contradiction. On the one hand, Gorgias maintained that rhetoric was a morally neutral techne, thus Gorgias and other teachers of rhetoric cannot be blamed if their students misuse rhetoric. On the other hand, when Socrates asked Gorgias if his students all knew justice, Gorgias agreed, saying that if a student came to him ignorant of justice, Gorgias would teach it alongside rhetoric. But, on the premise that to know justice is to do justice, this would imply that no rhetoricians would do injustice. Polus claimed that Callicles erred by allowing himself to be shamed into claiming that he would teach justice alongside rhetoric.

When Socrates questioned Polus, the latter claimed that doing injustice is not wrong, but it is shameful. This premise allowed Socrates to defeat Polus. Thus Polus fell victim to the very same sense of shame for which he criticized Gorgias. Thus, although Socrates claims to be pursuing the truth, he’s in fact depending upon merely conventional and popular ideas of the fine and shameful. These ideas are:

. . . fine [kalon] only by convention [nomos], not by nature [physis]. These, nature and convention, are for the most part opposed to each other. So if someone out of embarrassment shrinks from saying what he thinks, he is bound to contradict himself. You’ve spotted this little trick too, and are very unscrupulous about using it in argument. If people talk about the way things are by convention, you question them about the way things are in nature. If they talk about how things are in nature, you ask them about how things are by convention. (482e–483a)[1]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s From Plato to Postmodernism here

The Greek word nomos means law or convention. Nomos is opposed to physis or nature. This distinction is absolutely central to early Greek natural philosophers and many of the sophists. Nature is distinguished from convention because nature is everywhere the same, whereas convention varies from place to place. Nature also remains the same over time, whereas conventions change. The Greeks had a deep, core conviction that the universal and unchanging is good. Permanence is good; change is bad. Universality is good; particularism is bad. Therefore, nature is good, and convention is bad.

If moral conventions are contemptible, how should we live? For the sophists, the answer is to look out for number one, i.e., to pursue wealth and power for oneself liberated from all moral scruples. But if you no longer follow conventional norms, what do you follow? You follow nature, in the sense that nature furnishes you with desires, and the satisfaction of these desires brings pleasure. But if this is the case, then nature and norms are no longer necessarily opposed. Norms are not all conventional. Nature can serve as a norm as well. Hence Callicles offers the idea of what is “right by nature.”

But what does Callicles think is right by nature?

In my view . . . nature itself shows clearly what is just — for the better man to have more than the worse, and the more powerful more than the less powerful. It is evident in many areas that this is how things are, both in the animal world and among humans, in whole cities and races — that justice has been adjudged to be precisely this — the stronger ruling over, and getting the better of, the weaker. By what right, after all, did Xerxes lead his expedition against Greece — or his father against the Scythians? (483c–d)

Interestingly enough, Xerxes was defeated by the Greeks, and Darius I, his father, was defeated by the Scythians. Every Greek knew that. So Plato is putting words in Callicles’ mouth that undermine his case. But let’s leave that aside. Callicles continues:

You could give any number of similar examples. These people, I take it, act as they do in accordance with nature — the nature of the just. Yes, by Zeus, and in accordance with law the law of nature/the right by nature, though possibly not with this law which we put in place. (483e)

For Callicles, the right by nature is that the strong rule the weak. The strong also should have a greater share of the world’s goods.

Callicles rejects the distinction that Polus makes between the good and the shameful (doing injustice is good but also shameful). Instead, he holds that the bad and the shameful are the same thing:

In nature, anything is more shameful which is also worse: being treated unjustly, for example, though by convention acting unjustly is more shameful. And that’s because a real man doesn’t have this happen to him, this being treated unjustly. It only happens to some slave for whom death is preferable to life, who, when he is treated unjustly and downtrodden, is incapable of defending himself or anyone else he cares for. (483a–b)

Callicles believes that what is “right by convention” is laid down by the weak, not the strong:

If you ask me, the people who put laws — conventions — in place are the weak, the many. It is with an eye to themselves and their own advantage that they put the laws in place, praise the things they praise, and blame the things they blame. They intimidate the more forceful among mankind, the ones capable of getting the better of others, and to stop them getting the better of them, they say that getting the better of others is shameful and unjust, and that this is what injustice is: trying to get the better of everyone else. (483b–c)

Conventional laws aim to secure the equality of the weak and the strong, in terms of power and goods: “For themselves, I imagine they are well pleased if they can have an equal share, given their inferiority” (483c). “We take the best and most forceful among us — catching them young, like lions — mold them with spells and bewitchments, and enslave them. We tell them they should have what is equal, and that this is what is fine and just” (483e–484a).

However, some men see through conventional ideas of justice, throw them off, and follow what is right by nature. What allows this is strength of nature:

. . . if a man is born with a strong enough nature, he shakes all this [i.e., convention] off, breaks through it, makes his escape from it. He tramples on our prescriptions, our charms, our spells, our laws which all run counter to nature, and rising up, he stands revealed as our master . . . , and there what is just in nature shines forth. (484a)

This ends the first part of Callicles’ speech, so let’s pause here to take stock. Not only does this speech contain the first known occurrence of the idea of the right by nature, it also anticipates Nietzsche by more than two millennia. Indeed, this may be the source of Nietzsche’s ideas of master and slave morality. For Callicles, the law of nature is the struggle for power. Nature is red in tooth and claw. What is right by nature is that the strong rule the weak and have more. This is what Nietzsche called master morality. According to Callicles, conventional right is instituted by the weak to protect themselves from the strong. This is what Nietzsche called slave morality. Whereas the masters insist on inequality, the slaves desire equality. But in certain men, nature is stronger than convention, so they burst the trammels of conventional morals and seek to set themselves up as masters.

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

Socrates agrees that there is a right by nature. This is the core of the moral revolution of Socratic philosophy.[2]

Callicles, moreover, believes that Socrates agrees with him about natural right. Thus he is accusing Socrates of acting in bad faith by exploiting what Callicles thinks are purely conventional morals and the shame that attaches to them. Socrates defeated Gorgias and Polus by their attachment to conventional morals and their sense of shame. But Callicles sees himself as entirely free of conventional morals and conventional shame. Thus he is willing to speak the truth, regardless of public opinion, and he believes that this will make him invincible in argument with Socrates. (Socrates, by contrast, thinks that shame is natural and helps us discover what is right by nature.)

Why does Callicles call out Socrates for exploiting conventional morals and grandstanding to the public? If Callicles is a real sophist, shouldn’t he be admiring Socrates for exploiting people’s attachment to conventional norms? That’s how you win in law court. That’s how you win in politics. You don’t stand before the public and tell them frankly that all their ideals are bunk. No, you speak about “ traditional moral values” or “freedom,” whatever nonsense the segment of the public you’re trying to pander to believes in. Callicles is indignant that Socrates is exploiting people’s residual attachment to what he thinks are fake norms in order to win an argument. From a sophist, this is surprising.

There’s something more philosophical than sophistical about Callicles. First, Callicles stands for truth, not opinion — nature, not convention. Indeed, he holds the revolutionary philosophical idea that nature can provide norms of conduct. Second, Callicles has a sense of intellectual probity that makes him indignant when he sees Socrates apparently exploiting convention and playing to the crowd to win an argument. Third, Callicles believes in frank speech, which is basically the opposite of what we can call “politic” speech. Callicles is not just mentally liberated from convention, he also publicly challenges and flouts it.

Although Callicles is indeed more philosophical than Gorgias or Polus, Socrates still disagrees with Callicles about what norms are sanctioned by nature. Moreover, as we shall see in the second half of his speech, Callicles may have a philosophical education or temperament, but he does not think that philosophy is an honorable way of life. Instead, he has embarked upon a life of pursuing power. Socrates, however, will try to build upon Callicles’ philosophical temperament to convert him from the love of power to the love of wisdom.

Notes

[1] I am using the Gorgias translation in Plato, Gorgias, Menexenus, Protagoras, ed. Malcolm Schofield, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The Griffith translation is the best I have encountered in terms of both accuracy and readability, but I have made some changes.

[2] In The Trial of Socrates, I argue that this idea emerges first in Aristophanes’ Clouds. See the chapter on Aristophanes’ Clouds.