Artemisia Gentileschi, Allegory of Rhetoric, 1650

1,989 words

(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 12 here, Part 13 here, Part 14 here, Part 15 here, Part 16 here, Part 17 here.)

Securing Ourselves Against Injustice (508c–513c)

Recall that one of Callicles’ main arguments for prizing the techne of rhetoric is that it is a source of power for securing oneself against injustice. Socrates now returns to this argument and dispenses with it:

Let us examine what you reproach me for. Is it well said or not that I am unable to help myself or any of my friends or kin, or to save them from the greatest dangers, but that I am subject, like people without civil rights, to the will of any man, whether he wishes to punch me on the chin . . . or confiscate my goods, or exile me from my city, or ultimately slay me?

Callicles believes that suffering injustice, up to and including an unjust death, is the worst possible thing. Socrates thinks these are bad things, but he thinks there is something worse than suffering injustice, namely committing it, and, more broadly, having a corrupt soul.

After stating this thesis, Socrates makes an important point about philosophical method.

This appeared true in our former discussion, as I say, and it is secured and bound fast, if it is not too rude to say so, with logoi of adamant and iron. So, at any rate, it would seem, and unless you, or someone younger and more daring than you, shall unbind and loose those logoi, it is impossible to speak well and yet say other than what I am saying now. The same logos is ever mine, namely, that while I do not know [oida] how things stand in these matters, I have never met anyone able to speak otherwise without being ridiculous, as now. So again, I take these to be so.

When Socrates claims that it is better to suffer injustice than to do it, he does not claim to know it, in a strong sense of that word, namely knowledge that is beyond the possibility of revision. Instead, he claims that he has not yet heard a good argument against his position, but he remains open to considering one.

Then Socrates suggests a general principle, namely that the greatest boetheia, meaning help, aid, rescue, or deliverance, secures us from the greatest of evils. Callicles agrees with this, but he and Socrates disagree about what the greatest evil is. For Socrates, the greatest evil is ultimately the corruption of one’s soul, which leads to doing injustice, whereas for Callicles, the greatest evil is death, which is the worst result of suffering injustice.

Socrates then asks how we can secure ourselves against both suffering and doing injustice. In both cases, he asks whether we can do so by a wish (boulesis) or by a power (dynamis). In other words, is it enough simply to make up our minds not to do or suffer injustice, or do we need to strengthen our will by acquiring additional powers, such as the techne of rhetoric, which Callicles has lauded for its saving power?

It is obvious that simply wishing not to suffer injustice is not sufficient to secure us, since nobody wants to suffer injustice, but we suffer it anyway. Thus Callicles readily assents to the claim that we must acquire some sort of power not to suffer injustice.

As for not doing injustice, Socrates has already argued that all men wish to do what is good, which would include not doing injustice. But this is not enough to avoid injustice, which is rampant. Socrates also argued that if all men wish to do good, they only do bad things out of ignorance. Thus if we wish to do justice, we need more than just good intentions. We also need a certain “power or art” that reinforces our good intentions. Namely, we need knowlege of what justice in fact is.

Callicles is not particularly interested in doing the right thing, so the agreement he offers is merely perfunctory, to keep the argument moving forward.

Then Socrates suggests what power one needs not to be a victim of injustice: “One must either rule in the city oneself or even rule as tyrant or else be a comrade of the existing regime.” This is music to Callicles’ ears. He heartily agrees.

But then Socrates offers a critique. Like attracts like. So, if you’re going to become friends with a tyrant, you must be like him. You can’t be better, because he’ll resent you. You can’t be inferior, because he’ll look down on you and treat you badly. You have to be pretty much like the tyrant. You must share his values. But you must submit to the tyrant’s will. Then you will enjoy some of his power and protection. Thus no one will be able to do injustice to you with impunity, nobody other than the tyrant, of course. One will even be able to do injustice oneself, with impunity.

But there’s a price. To be like the tyrant, you must share his values and activities. But tyrants, by their very nature, are corrupt, so you must become corrupt as well. If the tyrant commits injustice, then you must commit injustice as well. As Socrates sums it up at 511a: “So then, the greatest evil will befall him when he is degenerate and maimed in his soul through imitation of the master and through power.” But is it worth it? In effect, Socrates is asking, “What does it profit you to gain the whole world if you lose your soul?” Socrates says it is not worth saving one’s life if one has to lose one’s soul.

Callicles, however, has a ready response to this: “Don’t you know that this imitator of yours [the man who becomes like the tyrant] will kill the fellow who refuses to imitate that man [the tyrant], if he wishes, and confiscate his property?” For Callicles, the worst two things in the world are loss of life and loss of property.

Callicles, in short, has a “bourgeois” value system, because he places property and self-preservation above personal honor and integrity. Socrates, however, thinks that his personal honor and integrity—the health of his soul—are more important than a long life or property. Thus he is unwilling to extend his life by corrupting his soul. Thus Socrates has an aristocratic value system that prefers death to dishonor and corruption.

Nobody wants to be murdered, but Socrates thinks that there is some solace in the fact that in Callicles’ scenario, “it will be a base man killing a noble and good man.” Callicles’ response is that it is especially infuriating for bad men to kill good men. This is an important point because it shows that Callicles understands on some level that goodness is not identical with strength, for if that were true, good men literally could not be killed by bad men, for the killer would be good by virtue of killing and the victim would be bad by fault of being the victim.

Socrates brushes this aside, though, because he wishes to focus on Callicles’ underlying premise, which he formulates as “a man ought to contrive to live as long as possible and be concerned for those arts which always save us from danger.” Callicles agrees with this statement: “Yes, by Zeus, and I’m counseling you correctly!”

Socrates’ argument is that self-preservation is not the highest good. If self-preservation is the highest good, then wouldn’t the arts that save lives—like piloting ships—have the highest status? The Greeks did not think so, and Socrates has an explanation: the life-saving arts don’t have the highest status, because the highest value is not life itself but rather the good life. Thus it makes sense that arts that save life itself, without regard to the quality of life, do not enjoy the highest status.

Recall Socrates’ hardest saying from the Apology: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This means that almost every life is not worth living, because all of us start out unreflective, and only a few of us end up engaging in self-examination, i.e., philosophy.

Socrates enlists Callicles’ own aristocratic prejudices against him. Callicles looks down on the people like ships’ pilots. He would never let his daughter marry one of them. Yet why should he feel that way if he thinks that “virtue is simply this, saving oneself and one’s own property,” regardless of the quality of one’s soul? By contrast, Socrates asserts that the “noble and the good” (to gennaion kai to agathon)—which are the aims of the true aristocrat—are not the same as saving and being saved.

Men should not be concerned with how long they live but rather with how well they live. We should not love life as such, but the good life. We lower ourselves by trifling about making our lives longer, given that we have very little control over such factors. Thus, instead we should “turn over what concerns these things [the length of life] to the god and believe the women’s[1] saying that no man may escape his destiny.” Having done that, we should focus on “in what way he who is going to live for a time lives best.”

Socrates insists that the best life for a man is not to become like the city in which he lives. This presages Aristotle’s discussion in book three of the Politics of the relationship between the good man and the good citizen. What makes a good man is determined by nature and is not relative to time and place. What makes a good citizen is relative to the laws of his particular time and place. The good man and the good citizen would coincide only in a city whose laws are based purely on nature.

But there are no such cities. Thus in the Athens of Socrates’ day, being a good man and being a good citizen are at odds. Since political ambition requires being like the regime, one can only buy power at the cost of one’s soul. He urges Callicles to “Consider then whether this is to your advantage and mine . . . so we will not suffer what they say happens to the witches of Thessaly, who draw down the moon and cause an eclipse.” According to E. R. Dodds, the Greeks believed that “a witch must pay for her powers either by a mutilation (often blindness) or by the sacrifice of a member of her family.”[2]  Thus, as Socrates continues, “the choice of such power in the city would then be at the cost of what we hold most dear.” In other words, political power must be paid for by the mutilation of the soul.

Socrates also cautions Callicles against sophists selling him a techne that will allow him to gain power merely by acting like the public, while remaining himself in private. Political ambition requires genuine friendship with the public, which means you must be like them, not merely act like them. When people listen to a speech, they don’t just respond to the words, they also respond to the character of the speaker. Thus if you desire to be a rhetorician and a statesman, you must share the character of the city you wish to rule.

Callicles replies, “I don’t know why, but you seem to me to make sense, Socrates.” This is genuine progress. But, Callicles adds, “Yet I suffer the affection of the multitude: I don’t quite believe you.”

Notes

[1] R. E. Allen suggests that this is a reference to the Eleusinian Mysteries (The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias. Menexenus, trans. R. E. Allen [New Haven: Yale, 1984], 302 n9), but it could also be equivalent to the idea of an “old wives’ tale.”

[2] Quoted in Allen, 302 n10.