Callicles
In the Gorgias, he confronts Socrates with the right of the stronger: nature wills that the superior rule, enjoy without restraint, and take more.
other · 380 BCE
An ambitious young Athenian of the deme of Acharnae, host to the sophist and about to enter political life, Callicles is the last and most formidable of the three interlocutors of 's . Where Gorgias and then Polus retreat, overcome by shame, he takes up the argument without disguise and pushes to its limit the thesis the others dared not own: received morality is only a trap laid for the strong by the multitude of the weak. A character perhaps drawn from a real man but known to us through Plato alone, he embodies one of the most formidable adversaries Socrates ever had to face, close to the of the Republic and a figure whom readers of have often likened to his morality of masters.
What is called justice is only the by which the weak bridle the strong; by nature, the better should rule the inferior and possess more.
To live well is not to prune one's desires but to let them grow as large as they can, then to have the strength to fill them: license is virtue itself.
To content oneself with an equal share when one is worth more is a slave's soul: the superior man pursues his own advantage and takes what his strength affords him.
The pleasant and the good are one: the sovereign good is to feel as much as possible, and nothing else.
Philosophy is a child's game: past youth it makes a man ridiculous and defenceless; life is in action, not in self-examination.
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Callicles picks no function for philosophy: his position is that it has none. Fit at most as a formative game for the young, it is a worthless pastime for the grown man, whom he urges to abandon it for action and power.
Justification
Against temperance, he holds that living well means letting one's desires grow as large as possible instead of pruning them, then having the courage to fill them; unleashed without restraint is virtue itself. Socrates counters with the leaky jar, the insatiable soul no inflow can fill; Callicles embraces it, preferring the life that ceaselessly streams and refills to that of the stone, motionless and sated.
Plato, Gorgias, 491e-492c (the praise of intemperance) · Plato, Gorgias, 493a-494c (the leaky jar)
Justification
Pressed to say what the good is, he flatly identifies the pleasant and the good: to live well is to feel as much as possible. This is not Epicurus's measured but a hedonism of intensity. Cornered by Socrates, who makes him grant that even base pleasures count, he gives ground, but the opening thesis remains his own avowal.
Plato, Gorgias, 494e-495a (the pleasant and the good are one) · Plato, Gorgias, 495a-499b (the Socratic refutation)
Justification
To Socratic self-examination he opposes that philosophy is charming in a young man but makes the grown man who lingers over it ridiculous and helpless, ignorant of the laws and of affairs, exposed to being slapped with no recourse. Life lies in action, reputation and power; he presses Socrates to give up such trifles for "the music of affairs".
Plato, Gorgias, 484c-486d (the praise then the critique of philosophy)
Justification
Extending his praise of desire, he takes bodily pleasures to be the very stuff of happiness: the strong man has the right to procure them amply; asceticism is only a morality of impotence dressed up as wisdom.
Plato, Gorgias, 491e-492c
Justification
Callicles unmasks received justice as a contrivance: the weak, being the majority, framed the laws and the words "just" and "unjust" to bridle the strong and secure equality for themselves. That justice is mere (nomos), variable and self-serving; the only real norm is that of nature (physis), where the better rules and holds more. His position thus blends a corrosive relativism toward established morality with the assertion of a natural right of the stronger that he takes to be a fact.
Nature herself shows that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, and the more capable than the less.Gorgias, 483d
Plato, Gorgias, 482e-484c (the nature/law distinction) · Plato, Gorgias, 483b-d (the weak make the laws)
Justification
His principle is that each should pursue their own advantage and that the superior man is right to have more (): to content oneself with an equal share, when one is worth more, is the mark of a slave. Self-sacrifice and moderation are the values by which the weak tame the strong.
Plato, Gorgias, 483c-d · Plato, Gorgias, 490a-491d
Justification
Liberty, for him, is the absence of all restraint; he expressly rejects liberty as self-government, judging it servitude: how could one be happy who is a slave to anything, even to one's own temperance? The only freedom is to do as one pleases, appetites unfurled.
Plato, Gorgias, 491e-492c
Justification
To rule and to hold more belongs by right to "the better and more intelligent", not to the crowd that chance assembles; his criterion of the "better" is not the Socratic knowledge of the good but the capacity to will and to obtain. It is an aristocracy of nature, at the opposite pole from Athenian democratic equality.
Plato, Gorgias, 483c-d; 490a
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Justification
He contests equal shares as an extortion by the weak: just distribution, according to nature, gives more to the superior, not an identical portion to all. His rejection of egalitarianism rests not on self-ownership or the desert of labor but on natural superiority; it is by this refusal of equal sharing that he meets, from afar, the anti-redistributive side.
Plato, Gorgias, 483c; 490a-491a
Justification
Since nature gives the strong the right to take, coercion and conquest are not an evil to be contained but the normal expression of order: Pindar's line and the example of Xerxes marching on Greece serve him to legitimate force as the ground of right. The violence of the powerful need not justify itself before a morality: it is justice itself.
Plato, Gorgias, 483d-484b
Justification
His whole case erects into a norm: what beasts do among themselves, cities among themselves, the strong over the weak, that is justice "according to nature", which human convention only masks. He cites the conquests, the expedition of Xerxes, and Pindar's line making law the "king" that justifies the violence of the stronger.
Plato, Gorgias, 483d-484b (nature, animals, cities, Pindar)
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Justification
Everyone, if they dared, would pursue their own advantage and want to possess more than others: displayed moderation is only an admission of weakness or a ruse. This bedrock of egoism and rivalry, which law contains without abolishing, places him on the side of an anthropological pessimism.
Plato, Gorgias, 483b-c; 491e-492a