INJUSTICE OVER JUSTICE

Thrasymachus Of Chalcedon was known to be a controversial sophist, courtesy of Plato. He is well covered both by Plato scholars and by general historians of ancient Greek philosophy. But for some reason he is almost unknown as a philosopher in his own right to the students of Greek philosophy and is more familiar to them as an in-your-face personage in Plato’s Politeia, than as a real thing.

He is remarkable, however, and eminently worthy of a separate entry, even if we have to rely on Plato for an expression of his views. Plato may be biased against him, but he is on most occasions  an honest writer, and the inconsistencies regarding Thrasymachus, having generated a lot of scholarly disagreement, which continues up to this date, allow us to form an independent judgment of the man. Ironically, it still remains unclear if Thrasymachus’ defense of injustice over justice is a serious expression of his personal position, or merely a tongue-in-cheek “statement of fact.”

His most famous quotes from Plato’s Politeia are these:

I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.

Thus, Socrates, injustice on a sufficiently large scale is a stronger, freer, and a more masterful thing than justice, and, as I said in the beginning, it is the advantage of the stronger that is the just, while the unjust is what profits man's self and is for his advantage.

Curiously, Socrates by his own admission seems to have been on friendly terms with Thrasymachus, despite the latter’s controversial views: Don’t try to breed a quarrel between me and Thrasymachus, who have just become friends and were not enemies before either.

The most important observation that can be made about Thrasymachus, however, is that, reading him, I feel the spirit of Nietzsche in the air. I have not found a single mention of Thrasymachus in Nietzsche’s writings, but I can clearly feel the connection. It is very easy to build a bridge from the quotes above to politics and ethics. If justice is indeed injustice, that is, the justice of the strong, then morality, which always reflects the concept of justice, can be seen as the morality, or immorality, of the ruling classes, and any changing of the guard leads to a necessitated revaluation of values, whatever it means. (See my earlier pertinent notes on this subject.)