World Community
Podcast #8: Universal Values for a World Community
Seeking values that are truly universal and appropriate for the world community requires that we transcend not only national boundaries but also that we go beyond our time, our particular culture, and the specific values that characterize our unique context. This does not mean that we must relinquish our individuality. Human beings are able to dwell simultaneously in many layers of meaning, so being part of a world community is fully compatible with living in a particular nation, working for a specific company, holding citizenship in a local town, county province, or commonwealth. If we only admit what is specific and particular, then the universal is lost and there can be no common basis for a world community. In the 20th century, a variety of forces eliminated universal thinking from public discourse. It was replaced by positions claiming that all values are relative.
Positivism In philosophy the movement that most clearly and forcefully rejected universal values was called logical positivism — or simply positivism. For this reason the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, in a recent publication, examines positivism as part of his effort to present and defend the cosmopolitan way of thinking about world community. Appiah summarizes the basic line of argument used by the positivists this way:
There are facts and there are values. Check. Unlike values, facts—the things that make beliefs true and false—are the natural inhabitants of the world, the things that scientists can study or that we can explore with our own senses. Check. So, if people in other places have different basic desires from people around here—and so have different values—that’s not something we can rationally criticize. No appeal to reasons can correct them. Check. And if no appeal to reasons can correct them, then trying to change their minds must involve appeal to something other than reason: which is to say, to something unreasonable. There seems no alternative to relativism about fundamental values. Checkmate (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, W. W. Norton, 2006, p. 22).
Positivism, following this line of reasoning, excluded the entire realm of values from the cognitive domain. Ethics, politics, the arts, and religion simply dropped out of the public consideration of what is true and false. The language of science favored by positivism was formulated and codified by a group of European philosophers that came to be called “the Vienna Circle.” Science, following the model of physics and mathematics, was deemed to be the one and only way to present and justify concepts, theories, decisions, and actions. Positivists claimed that science and technology are universal, open to all members of the world community. They said that values are local and particular, not common but separate and subjective. Whatever their differences, the positivists generally agreed on two fundamental demands. (1) All statements must be expressed in truth functional propositions, ideally in the symbols of formal logic. This kind of language became increasingly attractive as computers began to dominate the exchange and processing of information, because symbolic logic is the language of computers. (2) The second basic demand is that all statements must be verified by sense experience. The world was divided into two realms — the realm of fact and the realm of value. Reality is not one and common but divided and separated onto two domains that have no way of connecting with each other. In this way positivism created an unbridgeable dualism between what is (namely, facts) and what ought to be (that is, values).
The positivists considered values to be subjective, simply a product of personal emotions, sensations, and desires. They differ from person to person, from time to time, and from place to place. This relativistic approach moved from the realm of values to the cognitive domain. The role of language itself became the subject of philosophical analysis. The first thesis of positivism — the claim that whatever we can know must be able to be formulated in truth functional propositions — was seriously questioned. Perhaps language is simply a heuristic tool, a useful device that has no way of connecting with reality. One of the members of the Vienna Circle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, specifically attacked the idea of universals, challenging the possibility of finding a common element among any set of diverse objects. Consider games as an example. What do all games have in common? Rather than a universal property, Wittgenstein suggested that the most we can find is something more like a family resemblance (Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I, Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, The Macmillan Company, 1953, # 66). Philosophy in a variety of forms took this rejection of what is common and universal as one of its central beliefs.
If everything is constantly changing, then everything is relative. If only symbolic logic is able to state truth and reality, then ethics, politics, and the arts are excluded from public discourse. If values have no cognitive role, they are irrational and cannot be criticized. But if values cannot be rationally justified and evaluated, the only way to rule a world community is through force. Hence, might makes right. It is impossible to give good reasons why the interests and values of one nation ought to prevail over those of another. Instead of reason, nationalism appeals to passions, emotions, and basic sensations related to pleasure and pain. According to this scheme, relativism in values is the only option. World empire, run by a single superpower, cannot be justified rationally, so it must be established and defended by power—including its military, economic, sectarian, and rhetorical forms.
The One and the Many Relativism in knowledge and in values is one of the oldest problems on record. Is reality one or many? Is it stable and constant or fluid and changing? Parmenides, a Presocratic thinker who lived more than a century before Plato, developed a way of thinking that was designed to refute relativism by eliminating all change and all diversity. He claimed that reality is one and that all distinctions and divisions are illusory. He said:
Then, only one single message remains for you on your way, namely what is is. The path is well marked. Because it is unborn, it is unending, for it is whole in its constitution and unshakable (Parmenides, Fragment 8, translated by Albert A. Anderson and Lieselotte Anderson — Agora Publications, Inc., 1998).
Being itself must be one. It has no beginning, no middle, and no end. When we trust our thinking rather than our sense experience, the logic of his argument is clear and convincing. But when we focus on what can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, we are easily led away from being and are confused by an infinite number of illusions and confusions. Thinking rather than sense experience reveals truth and reality. In Fragment 3, Parmenides says: “Thinking and being are the same” (ibid.). He means that being — what we would call reality — is the only court of appeal for truth. Man is not the measure of all things, as Protagoras said, but being is the measure of all things. Thinking must disclose reality, or else it provides only illusion and deception.
One difficulty with Parmenides’ philosophy is that it seems to provide only an absolute, monolithic way of thinking that has no place for change and difference. Heraclitus, a contemporary of Parmenides, insisted that diversity, distinction, and change must be preserved in any credible account of reality. He says:
Nature also seems to strive toward opposites. From this, it brings forth harmony, as when it joins the masculine with the feminine and initiates harmony through the unity of opposites — not from sameness (Heraclitus, Fragment 10, translated by Albert A. Anderson and Lieselotte Anderson — Agora Publications, Inc., 1998).
Contrary to what first appears, Heraclitus and Parmenides actually agree on the most fundamental issue. They both maintain that reality is common, not fragmented and disconnected. Heraclitus, in Fragment 2, says: “Therefore it is right to follow what is common. Yet, although the law is common to all, many live as if they had their own insight.” The law Heraclitus has in mind is the fundamental nature of reality, what the Greeks called logos. From that same Greek word we also get the word logic, but this is not the rigid formal logic that dominated in the 20th century version of positivism. It is the deeper logic that unites science, the arts, ethics, and politics. Here is how Heraclitus puts it in Fragment 30:
This world order, which is the same for all beings, was created neither by one of the gods nor by humans. Rather, it has always been and will continue to be like an eternal fire, rekindling according to measure and dying down according to measure.
It is important to note that both Heraclitus and Parmenides wrote in poetic form, not in symbolic logic. Poetic language uses metaphor in order to articulate meaning on more than one level at the same time. That does not violate the most basic law of logic — the law of non-contradiction — because poetry is able to maintain consistency internal to each level of meaning. The advantage of multi-layered language is that it is able to articulate the complexity of reality.
Community and the Cosmos The cosmopolitan idea provides a way of transcending modernism, nationalism, and positivism. It is a postmodern idea, one that seeks what is truly common among all nations, so it requires a way of thinking about truth and reality that avoids dualism such as the separation between fact and value and the false dichotomy between human existence and the realm of nature. To overcome the deficiency of modernism, it is not necessary to create a whole new worldview out of whole cloth. The pre-modern philosophy of the ancient Greeks, especially the ideas presented in Plato’s dialogues, point the way out of the dilemma of modernism. To be truly cosmopolitan, we must see ourselves not only as citizens of the world but also as residents of the cosmos. Plato struggled with the problem of the one and the many that he inherited from Parmenides and Heraclitus. How can we think of reality as both one and many without contradicting ourselves? Plato used the dialogue form of exploring ideas because it is able to capture the dialectical nature of reality. Unlike the literal and monolithic language of symbolic logic, dialogue presents ideas in conflict and seeks to understand the multiform character of nature itself.
In Plato’s Gorgias, for example, the character Socrates embraces the cosmopolitan idea and uses it as a way of connecting the human community with the realm of nature.
Callicles, philosophers tell us that community, friendship, orderliness, moderation, and justice bind together not only human beings but also heaven and earth. That’s why this universe is called a cosmos, which means order, not immoderate disorder. Clever as you are, you seem not to understand the power of geometrical equality both among gods and human beings. You think that you ought to cultivate inequality and excess and care nothing about geometry. Either you must refute the principle that the happy are made happy by the possession of justice and moderation and that the miserable are made miserable by the possession of vice, or you must accept the consequences of that principle (Plato’s Gorgias, Agora Publications, Inc., 1994, Greek page 507).
If the cosmopolitan idea is to be used as a guide to human community, it must be grounded in the cosmos, in nature and reality. As we learned in Podcast # 3, Gorgias admitted early in this dialogue that the rhetoric he taught provided only belief, not knowledge. Belief can be either true or false, but knowledge could only be true. The reason the historical Gorgias was so successful is that he taught people how to persuade others — regardless of the truth. He promised to teach his followers “the power of ruling over others” through rhetoric (Plato’s Gorgias, 452).
In Podcast # 5, I discussed Kant’s distinction between autonomy and heteronomy in ethics. Ruling over others, no matter what the context, is a form of heteronomy — what Kant calls the source of all flawed ethical principles. Gorgias promises heteronomy. Two other characters in the same dialogue — Polus and Callicles — agree with Gorgias. Callicles praises excess rather than moderation, at least for real men with what he calls “noble natures” — those who have the courage and intelligence to take whatever they desire. Socrates asks him to clarify what he means by people who are “superior and wiser” than the others.
Socrates: Why won’t you tell me in what way a person must be superior and wiser in order to claim a larger share? Won’t you either accept a suggestion or offer one?
Callicles: I have already told you! In the first place, I mean by the superior not shoemakers or cooks but wise politicians who understand the administration of a state, who are not only wise but also courageous and able to carry out their plans, not people who faint from lack of spirit.
Socrates: Most excellent Callicles, notice how different is the charge I bring against you from the one you bring against me. You criticize me for always saying the same thing. But I criticize you for never saying the same about the same things. At one point you defined the better and superior as the stronger. Then you said it is the wiser. Now you present a new notion, declaring that the superior and the better are the more courageous. My good friend, I wish you would tell me once and for all whom you claim to be the better and superior and in what way.
Callicles: I have already told you that I mean those who are wise and courageous in the administration of the state. They are the ones who ought to rule and ought to have an advantage over their subjects. That is justice.
Socrates: Do you mean that they should have more than themselves?
Callicles: I don’t understand.
Socrates: I’m talking about self-rule. But perhaps you don’t think that each of us must rule over ourselves. Perhaps you think that it is enough simply to rule over others.
Callicles: What do you mean by “rule over ourselves”?
Socrates: Nothing complicated. I mean what is commonly said, that we should be moderate, be in control of ourselves, and should rule over our own pleasures and passions (Plato’s Gorgias, 491).
For Socrates, autonomy means ruling over ourselves, not acquiring unlimited pleasures and unjust power over others. The ultimate goal of ethics is goodness, not pleasure. “Pleasure and everything else is for the sake of good, and not good for the sake of pleasure” (ibid. 500). The central problem with Callicles’ ethical claims is that they rest on something ephemeral — the feelings of pleasure and pain, the desire for power, or the passion for fame and applause.
Socrates returns to the question of rhetoric and its relationship not only to truth but also to goodness. Earlier in the dialogue, he spent considerable time showing Polus and Callicles that the kind of rhetoric Gorgias teaches fails to achieve what matters most, a truly good life. Fortunately, there is another kind of rhetoric that does aim at goodness.
Socrates: Callicles, we have discovered a kind of rhetoric that is addressed to a crowd of men, women, and children—slave and free. But this isn’t really to our taste, because we have found it to have the character of flattery.
Callicles: True.
Socrates: Very good. Now what do you say about the other rhetoric which addresses the Athenian assembly and the assemblies of free people in other states? When they make speeches, do rhetoricians aim at what is best, desiring what will really improve the citizens? Or do they intend only to give them pleasure, forgetting the common good in favor of their own interest, playing with the people as with children, trying to amuse them but never considering whether they are better or worse as a result?
Callicles: I would make a distinction, Socrates. There are some rhetoricians who really do care about the public when they speak, but there are others of the sort you describe.
Socrates: That’s good enough for me. Rhetoric, then, is of two kinds, one that is mere flattery and shameful rubbish; and the other that is noble, aiming at the education and improvement of the souls of the citizens. This second kind of rhetoric strives to say what is best, whether welcome or unwelcome to the audience. Callicles, have you ever known such rhetoric? If you have, can you name any rhetorician of this sort?
Callicles: I cannot name anyone among the rhetoricians who are now living (Plato’s Gorgias, 502-503).
The true rhetorician seeks to promote laws that will help people rule over themselves, establishing justice and moderation in their own person and helping others do the same. How can that be achieved without falling back into heteronomy and imposing laws on others? Socrates’ art is that of the educator, not that of the popular politician.
Socrates: I think that I’m one of the few Athenians, perhaps the only one, who practices the true art of politics. I’m the only politician who speaks not with the goal of pleasing but with an eye on what is best rather than what is most pleasant. I’m unwilling to practice those skills you recommend, so I’ll have nothing to say in court. The image I used in speaking to Polus might be applied to me. I would be tried just as a physician who had been indicted by a pastry-cook would be tried in a court of children. What would the physician say if someone were to make the accusation this way: “Children, this person has done many evil things to you, especially the youngest among you, cutting and burning and starving you. You have been given the most bitter potions and forced to go without food and drink. How different from the wide variety of goodies I have obtained and given to you.” How do you suppose the physician could reply in such a predicament? I suppose the physician could tell the truth and say: “I did this for the sake of your health, children.” Wouldn’t there be a large clamor among such judges? How they would protest!
Callicles: I’m sure you’re right.
Socrates: The physician would be utterly at a loss about how to reply.
Callicles: No doubt about it.
Socrates: Well, this is just the sort of thing I would experience if I were brought before the court. I wouldn’t be able to review the pleasures I had provided for the people, which they consider to be benefits and advantages, though I don’t envy either the ones who provide or the ones who enjoy them. And if it’s said that I corrupt the young people and perplex their minds or that I criticize the older ones, whether in public or in private, I would not be permitted to say the truth: That I do all this for the sake of justice and out of a concern for your best interest, my judges, and only that. There’s no telling what might happen to me (Plato’s Gorgias, 521-522).
We know what was about to happen to Socrates for practicing his art. Questioning the people who hold political power is as dangerous today as it was in Plato’s Athens. In my next podcast I will take a closer look at the cosmopolitan idea, beginning with the issues of justice and tolerance.
Podcast #8: Universal Values for a World Community
Seeking values that are truly universal and appropriate for the world community requires that we transcend not only national boundaries but also that we go beyond our time, our particular culture, and the specific values that characterize our unique context. This does not mean that we must relinquish our individuality. Human beings are able to dwell simultaneously in many layers of meaning, so being part of a world community is fully compatible with living in a particular nation, working for a specific company, holding citizenship in a local town, county province, or commonwealth. If we only admit what is specific and particular, then the universal is lost and there can be no common basis for a world community. In the 20th century, a variety of forces eliminated universal thinking from public discourse. It was replaced by positions claiming that all values are relative.
Positivism In philosophy the movement that most clearly and forcefully rejected universal values was called logical positivism — or simply positivism. For this reason the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, in a recent publication, examines positivism as part of his effort to present and defend the cosmopolitan way of thinking about world community. Appiah summarizes the basic line of argument used by the positivists this way:
There are facts and there are values. Check. Unlike values, facts—the things that make beliefs true and false—are the natural inhabitants of the world, the things that scientists can study or that we can explore with our own senses. Check. So, if people in other places have different basic desires from people around here—and so have different values—that’s not something we can rationally criticize. No appeal to reasons can correct them. Check. And if no appeal to reasons can correct them, then trying to change their minds must involve appeal to something other than reason: which is to say, to something unreasonable. There seems no alternative to relativism about fundamental values. Checkmate (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, W. W. Norton, 2006, p. 22).
Positivism, following this line of reasoning, excluded the entire realm of values from the cognitive domain. Ethics, politics, the arts, and religion simply dropped out of the public consideration of what is true and false. The language of science favored by positivism was formulated and codified by a group of European philosophers that came to be called “the Vienna Circle.” Science, following the model of physics and mathematics, was deemed to be the one and only way to present and justify concepts, theories, decisions, and actions. Positivists claimed that science and technology are universal, open to all members of the world community. They said that values are local and particular, not common but separate and subjective. Whatever their differences, the positivists generally agreed on two fundamental demands. (1) All statements must be expressed in truth functional propositions, ideally in the symbols of formal logic. This kind of language became increasingly attractive as computers began to dominate the exchange and processing of information, because symbolic logic is the language of computers. (2) The second basic demand is that all statements must be verified by sense experience. The world was divided into two realms — the realm of fact and the realm of value. Reality is not one and common but divided and separated onto two domains that have no way of connecting with each other. In this way positivism created an unbridgeable dualism between what is (namely, facts) and what ought to be (that is, values).
The positivists considered values to be subjective, simply a product of personal emotions, sensations, and desires. They differ from person to person, from time to time, and from place to place. This relativistic approach moved from the realm of values to the cognitive domain. The role of language itself became the subject of philosophical analysis. The first thesis of positivism — the claim that whatever we can know must be able to be formulated in truth functional propositions — was seriously questioned. Perhaps language is simply a heuristic tool, a useful device that has no way of connecting with reality. One of the members of the Vienna Circle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, specifically attacked the idea of universals, challenging the possibility of finding a common element among any set of diverse objects. Consider games as an example. What do all games have in common? Rather than a universal property, Wittgenstein suggested that the most we can find is something more like a family resemblance (Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I, Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, The Macmillan Company, 1953, # 66). Philosophy in a variety of forms took this rejection of what is common and universal as one of its central beliefs.
If everything is constantly changing, then everything is relative. If only symbolic logic is able to state truth and reality, then ethics, politics, and the arts are excluded from public discourse. If values have no cognitive role, they are irrational and cannot be criticized. But if values cannot be rationally justified and evaluated, the only way to rule a world community is through force. Hence, might makes right. It is impossible to give good reasons why the interests and values of one nation ought to prevail over those of another. Instead of reason, nationalism appeals to passions, emotions, and basic sensations related to pleasure and pain. According to this scheme, relativism in values is the only option. World empire, run by a single superpower, cannot be justified rationally, so it must be established and defended by power—including its military, economic, sectarian, and rhetorical forms.
The One and the Many Relativism in knowledge and in values is one of the oldest problems on record. Is reality one or many? Is it stable and constant or fluid and changing? Parmenides, a Presocratic thinker who lived more than a century before Plato, developed a way of thinking that was designed to refute relativism by eliminating all change and all diversity. He claimed that reality is one and that all distinctions and divisions are illusory. He said:
Then, only one single message remains for you on your way, namely what is is. The path is well marked. Because it is unborn, it is unending, for it is whole in its constitution and unshakable (Parmenides, Fragment 8, translated by Albert A. Anderson and Lieselotte Anderson — Agora Publications, Inc., 1998).
Being itself must be one. It has no beginning, no middle, and no end. When we trust our thinking rather than our sense experience, the logic of his argument is clear and convincing. But when we focus on what can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, we are easily led away from being and are confused by an infinite number of illusions and confusions. Thinking rather than sense experience reveals truth and reality. In Fragment 3, Parmenides says: “Thinking and being are the same” (ibid.). He means that being — what we would call reality — is the only court of appeal for truth. Man is not the measure of all things, as Protagoras said, but being is the measure of all things. Thinking must disclose reality, or else it provides only illusion and deception.
One difficulty with Parmenides’ philosophy is that it seems to provide only an absolute, monolithic way of thinking that has no place for change and difference. Heraclitus, a contemporary of Parmenides, insisted that diversity, distinction, and change must be preserved in any credible account of reality. He says:
Nature also seems to strive toward opposites. From this, it brings forth harmony, as when it joins the masculine with the feminine and initiates harmony through the unity of opposites — not from sameness (Heraclitus, Fragment 10, translated by Albert A. Anderson and Lieselotte Anderson — Agora Publications, Inc., 1998).
Contrary to what first appears, Heraclitus and Parmenides actually agree on the most fundamental issue. They both maintain that reality is common, not fragmented and disconnected. Heraclitus, in Fragment 2, says: “Therefore it is right to follow what is common. Yet, although the law is common to all, many live as if they had their own insight.” The law Heraclitus has in mind is the fundamental nature of reality, what the Greeks called logos. From that same Greek word we also get the word logic, but this is not the rigid formal logic that dominated in the 20th century version of positivism. It is the deeper logic that unites science, the arts, ethics, and politics. Here is how Heraclitus puts it in Fragment 30:
This world order, which is the same for all beings, was created neither by one of the gods nor by humans. Rather, it has always been and will continue to be like an eternal fire, rekindling according to measure and dying down according to measure.
It is important to note that both Heraclitus and Parmenides wrote in poetic form, not in symbolic logic. Poetic language uses metaphor in order to articulate meaning on more than one level at the same time. That does not violate the most basic law of logic — the law of non-contradiction — because poetry is able to maintain consistency internal to each level of meaning. The advantage of multi-layered language is that it is able to articulate the complexity of reality.
Community and the Cosmos The cosmopolitan idea provides a way of transcending modernism, nationalism, and positivism. It is a postmodern idea, one that seeks what is truly common among all nations, so it requires a way of thinking about truth and reality that avoids dualism such as the separation between fact and value and the false dichotomy between human existence and the realm of nature. To overcome the deficiency of modernism, it is not necessary to create a whole new worldview out of whole cloth. The pre-modern philosophy of the ancient Greeks, especially the ideas presented in Plato’s dialogues, point the way out of the dilemma of modernism. To be truly cosmopolitan, we must see ourselves not only as citizens of the world but also as residents of the cosmos. Plato struggled with the problem of the one and the many that he inherited from Parmenides and Heraclitus. How can we think of reality as both one and many without contradicting ourselves? Plato used the dialogue form of exploring ideas because it is able to capture the dialectical nature of reality. Unlike the literal and monolithic language of symbolic logic, dialogue presents ideas in conflict and seeks to understand the multiform character of nature itself.
In Plato’s Gorgias, for example, the character Socrates embraces the cosmopolitan idea and uses it as a way of connecting the human community with the realm of nature.
Callicles, philosophers tell us that community, friendship, orderliness, moderation, and justice bind together not only human beings but also heaven and earth. That’s why this universe is called a cosmos, which means order, not immoderate disorder. Clever as you are, you seem not to understand the power of geometrical equality both among gods and human beings. You think that you ought to cultivate inequality and excess and care nothing about geometry. Either you must refute the principle that the happy are made happy by the possession of justice and moderation and that the miserable are made miserable by the possession of vice, or you must accept the consequences of that principle (Plato’s Gorgias, Agora Publications, Inc., 1994, Greek page 507).
If the cosmopolitan idea is to be used as a guide to human community, it must be grounded in the cosmos, in nature and reality. As we learned in Podcast # 3, Gorgias admitted early in this dialogue that the rhetoric he taught provided only belief, not knowledge. Belief can be either true or false, but knowledge could only be true. The reason the historical Gorgias was so successful is that he taught people how to persuade others — regardless of the truth. He promised to teach his followers “the power of ruling over others” through rhetoric (Plato’s Gorgias, 452).
In Podcast # 5, I discussed Kant’s distinction between autonomy and heteronomy in ethics. Ruling over others, no matter what the context, is a form of heteronomy — what Kant calls the source of all flawed ethical principles. Gorgias promises heteronomy. Two other characters in the same dialogue — Polus and Callicles — agree with Gorgias. Callicles praises excess rather than moderation, at least for real men with what he calls “noble natures” — those who have the courage and intelligence to take whatever they desire. Socrates asks him to clarify what he means by people who are “superior and wiser” than the others.
Socrates: Why won’t you tell me in what way a person must be superior and wiser in order to claim a larger share? Won’t you either accept a suggestion or offer one?
Callicles: I have already told you! In the first place, I mean by the superior not shoemakers or cooks but wise politicians who understand the administration of a state, who are not only wise but also courageous and able to carry out their plans, not people who faint from lack of spirit.
Socrates: Most excellent Callicles, notice how different is the charge I bring against you from the one you bring against me. You criticize me for always saying the same thing. But I criticize you for never saying the same about the same things. At one point you defined the better and superior as the stronger. Then you said it is the wiser. Now you present a new notion, declaring that the superior and the better are the more courageous. My good friend, I wish you would tell me once and for all whom you claim to be the better and superior and in what way.
Callicles: I have already told you that I mean those who are wise and courageous in the administration of the state. They are the ones who ought to rule and ought to have an advantage over their subjects. That is justice.
Socrates: Do you mean that they should have more than themselves?
Callicles: I don’t understand.
Socrates: I’m talking about self-rule. But perhaps you don’t think that each of us must rule over ourselves. Perhaps you think that it is enough simply to rule over others.
Callicles: What do you mean by “rule over ourselves”?
Socrates: Nothing complicated. I mean what is commonly said, that we should be moderate, be in control of ourselves, and should rule over our own pleasures and passions (Plato’s Gorgias, 491).
For Socrates, autonomy means ruling over ourselves, not acquiring unlimited pleasures and unjust power over others. The ultimate goal of ethics is goodness, not pleasure. “Pleasure and everything else is for the sake of good, and not good for the sake of pleasure” (ibid. 500). The central problem with Callicles’ ethical claims is that they rest on something ephemeral — the feelings of pleasure and pain, the desire for power, or the passion for fame and applause.
Socrates returns to the question of rhetoric and its relationship not only to truth but also to goodness. Earlier in the dialogue, he spent considerable time showing Polus and Callicles that the kind of rhetoric Gorgias teaches fails to achieve what matters most, a truly good life. Fortunately, there is another kind of rhetoric that does aim at goodness.
Socrates: Callicles, we have discovered a kind of rhetoric that is addressed to a crowd of men, women, and children—slave and free. But this isn’t really to our taste, because we have found it to have the character of flattery.
Callicles: True.
Socrates: Very good. Now what do you say about the other rhetoric which addresses the Athenian assembly and the assemblies of free people in other states? When they make speeches, do rhetoricians aim at what is best, desiring what will really improve the citizens? Or do they intend only to give them pleasure, forgetting the common good in favor of their own interest, playing with the people as with children, trying to amuse them but never considering whether they are better or worse as a result?
Callicles: I would make a distinction, Socrates. There are some rhetoricians who really do care about the public when they speak, but there are others of the sort you describe.
Socrates: That’s good enough for me. Rhetoric, then, is of two kinds, one that is mere flattery and shameful rubbish; and the other that is noble, aiming at the education and improvement of the souls of the citizens. This second kind of rhetoric strives to say what is best, whether welcome or unwelcome to the audience. Callicles, have you ever known such rhetoric? If you have, can you name any rhetorician of this sort?
Callicles: I cannot name anyone among the rhetoricians who are now living (Plato’s Gorgias, 502-503).
The true rhetorician seeks to promote laws that will help people rule over themselves, establishing justice and moderation in their own person and helping others do the same. How can that be achieved without falling back into heteronomy and imposing laws on others? Socrates’ art is that of the educator, not that of the popular politician.
Socrates: I think that I’m one of the few Athenians, perhaps the only one, who practices the true art of politics. I’m the only politician who speaks not with the goal of pleasing but with an eye on what is best rather than what is most pleasant. I’m unwilling to practice those skills you recommend, so I’ll have nothing to say in court. The image I used in speaking to Polus might be applied to me. I would be tried just as a physician who had been indicted by a pastry-cook would be tried in a court of children. What would the physician say if someone were to make the accusation this way: “Children, this person has done many evil things to you, especially the youngest among you, cutting and burning and starving you. You have been given the most bitter potions and forced to go without food and drink. How different from the wide variety of goodies I have obtained and given to you.” How do you suppose the physician could reply in such a predicament? I suppose the physician could tell the truth and say: “I did this for the sake of your health, children.” Wouldn’t there be a large clamor among such judges? How they would protest!
Callicles: I’m sure you’re right.
Socrates: The physician would be utterly at a loss about how to reply.
Callicles: No doubt about it.
Socrates: Well, this is just the sort of thing I would experience if I were brought before the court. I wouldn’t be able to review the pleasures I had provided for the people, which they consider to be benefits and advantages, though I don’t envy either the ones who provide or the ones who enjoy them. And if it’s said that I corrupt the young people and perplex their minds or that I criticize the older ones, whether in public or in private, I would not be permitted to say the truth: That I do all this for the sake of justice and out of a concern for your best interest, my judges, and only that. There’s no telling what might happen to me (Plato’s Gorgias, 521-522).
We know what was about to happen to Socrates for practicing his art. Questioning the people who hold political power is as dangerous today as it was in Plato’s Athens. In my next podcast I will take a closer look at the cosmopolitan idea, beginning with the issues of justice and tolerance.
