THE COBBLER OF NIETZSCHE’S BOOTS

Our next sophistic philosopher in this subsection is Callicles, a pupil of Gorgias and naturally a character in Plato’s Dialogue Gorgias. In fact, we only know about Callicles’ existence from Plato’s Gorgias, but there is no point in arguing whether he deserves a place among the real men. What was of particular interest to us in Thrasymachus, the Nietzsche connection, is pushed into an even more explicit relief in Callicles, and for this reason alone, he is worthy of a separate entry. Here is the key excerpt from the Gorgias, where Callicles expounds his Nietzschean beliefs. (Once again we find no reference to him in Nietzsches Werke.)---

…For the truth is, Socrates, that you who pretend to be engaged in the pursuit of truth, are appealing now to the popular and vulgar notions of right, which are not natural, but only conventional. Convention and nature are generally at variance with one another… The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of the laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say that dishonesty is shameful and unjust meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbors; for knowing their own inferiority I suspect that they are too glad of equality. Therefore the endeavor to have more than the many is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice, whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. For, on what principle of justice did Xerxes invade Hellas, or his father [Darius] the Scythians? (not to speak of numberless other examples). Nay, but these are the men who act according to nature; yes, by Heaven, and according to the law of nature: and not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,-- charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them that with equality they must be content, and that the equal is the honorable and the just. But if there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural justice would shine forth…

Little else, I say again, is known about Callicles other than this exposition of his views of the nature of laws two millennia before Nietzsche shocked the world with them. Describing all laws as man-made, rather than as God-given, he stands not so much ahead of his time, as outside time and over historical continuity.