Every digital street corner has a Callicles these days, calling for the strong to cast off their shackles and remake the world.
Which is weird. The Philosopher Plato probably dropped Callicles — a real-life Athenian sophist — into his dialogue, Gorgias, so he could have Socrates wipe the floor with him.
We’ll dive into Callicles’s Socratic clash in my second read-along essay next week, but let’s quickly sum up his ideas:
* Law of the Jungle: It’s natural and right for the strong and capable to dominate the weak and take more than a “fair” share. Let the natural aristocracy rise!
* The Good Is Synonymous With the Pleasurable: Unshackling desire, constantly sating it, and wielding power constitute the good life. Discipline and moderation are idiotic.
* Justice Isn’t Just: Conventional morality, justice, and laws are tricks the weak invented to shackle the strong.
On “the far right,” you’ll find versions of Callicles’s ideology — via Nieztche — from the pen of Bronze Age Pervert, aka Costin Alamariu, lionizing aristocratic excellence and bemoaning “slave morality.” Many Twitter anons now chant the law of the jungle and insist the strong should rule over the weak.
Did Athenians Really Believe This?
Socrates tears Callicles to shreds in Gorgias, and the sophist struggles to defend himself before falling into sullen silence. So you might be thinking: Come on!
This couldn’t have been a popular ideology in ancient Athens! Callicles must be a straw man Plato invented to make virtue look good. Who would voice these pathetic doctrines in real life? After all, Athens was the birthplace of democracy! Democracy is about equality and justice for the many. Athens rescued Greece from Persian domination and freed Ionia from the yoke. Athenians wouldn’t dare voice these ideas.
Are you sure?
Gorgias is set during the Peloponnesian War, a horrible 27-year clash between Sparta and Athens. By the end, Athenian democracy was overthrown, the city was a shell of its former self, and all of Greece lay prostrate before the growing might of Macedonia. The politics and ethics of this era are what Callicles lived and breathed.
So what was this airborne ideology? It can be summed up simply: Might Makes Right. Itturns outCallicles and the Athenian assembly had a lot in common.
Athenian Realpolitik
In History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides tells us he’ll give us his tale stripped of all romance. It would be better to say he paints the canvas in amoral brutality.
He explains how Athens subjugated the Delian League members who once fought beside them to drive the Persians from Greek-speaking lands. Athens was the richest and the strongest city, and no one could defy it, so what could they do but submit? The island of Melos tried to stay neutral when the conflict with Sparta broke out, but Athens demanded it join the Delian League and pay tribute. If it refused, they’d wipe it off the map.
The Melesians complained to the Athenian emissaries that this was unjust. The Athenians replied, “…you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” (5.89). This last clause is the most famous of the book. If you’ve read Gorgias, the sentiment should sound familiar.
The Melesians decided to fight. The Athenians killed and enslaved them all. Later, several league members rebelled and were slaughtered and enslaved in turn. This is how Athenians treated their friends. This is how they treated the weak.
Thucydides isn’t espousing hedonism or amoral ethics like Callicles, but later generations saw his unvarnished tale as the realist mantra of power. No chivalry, no romance — this is how you win.
The Amoral Quintet
Callicles and Thucydides are part of a group — separated by time and space — that raised their voices against mainstream Christian and Platonic ethics. They’re flare-ups of an ancient counter-morality skeptical of restraint, virtue, and equality. They view these as weaknesses that will be exploited by our enemies.
Most read each other’s work and took the ideas in different directions.
Machiavelli:
Looking at what happened to Melos and taking lessons from the rest of history, Niccoli Machievelli decided to tell it like it was from the vantage point of 1513 A.D.
“A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good.” The Prince, ch. 15
With this in mind, Machiavelli laid out how leaders could dominate their opponents and succeed with little regard to “the good,” or what was “right.” The Prince was about operationalizing the Athenian maxim.
Hobbes:
Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides into English in 1629, and the Melian dialogue and its ramifications bled into Hobbes’s depiction of human suffering.
In Leviathan 6.8, Hobbes chose a very Calliclean definition of happiness: “continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth.”
But he thinks might makes right leads to chaos and endless bloodshed, a “war of all against all,” which, historically, it often has. This is the downfall of Athens in a nutshell. Hobbes’s solution is giving up our freedom and power to serve a monarch capable of keeping chaos at bay with brutal force. Hobbes would have us bow down to Machiavelli’s prince.
Nietzsche:
Anyone reading Gorgias after Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887 A.D) will spot a proto-Übermensch in Callicles. Indeed, Nietzsche was heavily influenced by Gorgias.
Nietzsche thought Callicles’s unbounded pursuit of pleasure was pathetic. But as a pure statement of aristocratic egoism, he admired the sophist. Nietzsche also shared Callicles’s contempt for the herd.
In Twilight of the Idols (1889 A.D.), he wrote how Thucydides acted as a counterweight to moralistic nonsense:
“My recreation, my predilection, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides, and perhaps the Prince of Machiavelli, are most closely related to me by the unconditional will not to delude oneself and to see reason in reality…One must follow closely and catch with one’s eyes how with perfect clarity he brings to light what the Greeks hid under the sophistry of morals: the drive for power speaks out of every sentence. Cold, hard, without illusion, he puts it down…”
Nietzsche’s primary contribution to this Quintet was casting morality not just as an illusion (Thucydides) or an expediency (Machiavelli), but expanding on Callicles’s idea of justice as a weapon of the powerless that shackles great men.
Did Plato Do This On Purpose?
If Bronze Age Pervert, aka, Costin Alamariu, is the bannerman of the new amoral right, he doesn’t make it easy to pin him down. He rambles in internet speak to make himself obscure, and even when publishing a straightforward dissertation, his reasoning is awkward and unconvincing for anyone who’s read the books he cites closely.
But if I were to steel man his argument for Callicles, it would be something like this:
Yes, Plato tears Callicles apart, but mostly over his pursuit of pleasure. But Socrates goes easy on Callicles over his assertion of aristocratic superiority. Plato structured the whole dialogue so Callicles’s counsel for domination and natural hierarchy is more impressive than Socrates’s call for virtue and discipline.
Anyone who reads Plato’s Republic will see there’s some truth to the claim. Plato was deeply suspicious of the masses, who could be led like sheep. They brought his city to ruin through stupidity and killed his beloved mentor, Socrates. This understanding led the US Founding Fathers to restrain democracy and separate powers to prevent such calamities, with partial success.
Even today, we can easily find large segments of the population supporting policies that are immoral or would hurt them and their country.
But Alamariu doesn’t stop at pointing out the masses’ stupidity. He’s a hedonist in ways Plato would find pathetic. And might makes right is an idea Socrates thoroughly crushes. Power without self-mastery is slavery.
Plato was clear: if justice is whatever the stronger impose, then when the masses overpower the strong — as in Athenian democracy — that’s justice. Callicles admits this. So either the law of the jungle justifies mob rule, or it must yield to a higher principle of the virtuous good.
You can’t have it both ways.
An Idea that Never Dies:
Before you dismiss all this as an internet-only phenomenon, consider that might makes right has never been vanquished by talk of human rights and our much vaunted international institutions. It’s reemerged in peaceable Europe for the first time since the fall of Communism. Check out this opinion piece from Germany, a country that dominated its weaker neighbors as recently as 1945, but has recently had a revulsion for its incredible military potential.
Hubert Wetzel writes in the Süddeutsche Zeitung:
“The strength of the law, its absolute, abstract validity, however desirable it may be, is an illusion – at least as far as war and peace are concerned. The law of the strongest is the reality in which we live.”
Machiavelli or Thucydides could have penned those words — be strong or be dominated. This is realpolitik.
But Plato and Socrates weren’t doves. Socrates was a war hero, and several Platonic dialogues speak of living virtuously and maintaining our strength of mind and body so we’re ready to stand up when our civilization needs us. They were concerned with the just use of power, but not eager to discard the potential to go on the offensive.
Like it or not, we live in a world where a thousand Callicleses lurk below the surface. They will take the stage if they can.
We’d best not forget it.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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