Has Socrates finally lost to Callicles?
What was Socrates vs. Callicles battle about? Was that the war that wise and noble philosopher waged against sinister and unprincipled sophist? However, after scrupulous consideration, we can find that it was actually Callicles who brought the rigorous reasoning and conscientious arguments, whereas Socrates, seemingly defending his thesis “doing injustice is worse than suffering injustice”, aggressively applied a variety of sophistic techniques and resources. He systematically substituted Callicles’s arguments with other, lower ones. Thus, he turned a desire as a productive and active drive into an endless pleasure’s chasing. Yet, it looks like Socrates himself was obsessed by the desire to win by any cost. Don’t we see nowadays a triumph of desire over pleasure? The triumph of active and constructive force over passive and reproductive? But even if one would argue that pleasure (in Socrates’s sense) is dominating, anyway, today we live in Callicles’s world and not in Socrates’s.
Comments (12)
I am going to side with Socrates. There is no suffering but that it is initiated in a mind capable of administering it. Prima facie, the doer is worse than the sufferer. We all suffer in some way, even apparently unjustly. But life is transitory, whereas 'our story', our legacy, or what is left of us after we did, will suffer the ignominy of having done the injustice. Those whose legacy can lay claim to have suffered are going to be much better off in the long run for having endured it or having succumbed to its ravages.
And they'll still be just as dead as everyone else. How will they be better off for having suffered? Because someone might write a sympathetic history of their woes? Or because the gods of the afterlife when show them more mercy?
If not, then you're saying those of us who suffer will be better off later on in life then those who caused the suffering (I take it by being mindless consumers)?
and self-indulgence is a pleasure. If you write that self-indulgence is a pressure, that means that it is a result of the more fundamental process, causing an endless pleasure-chasing.
Don't you think that Socrates was using his thesis just as a pretext? Indeed, he was obsessed by the desire to win by any cost.
Hedonism is generally understood as a philosophy that sets the pursuit of pleasure (understood in the sense of pleasures that are sensorily gratifying, ecstatic, etc.) as the primary ethical goal.
I replied to gloaming, who wrote:"Quoting gloaming".
If we consider again Socrates's thesis:"doing injustice is worse than suffering injustice”,
it was deciphered recently by Deleuse and Guattari as "Where one believed there was the law, there is, in fact, desire and desire alone. Justice is desire and not law."
Okay, I see that I typed 'did' instead of 'die.' Sorry for not seeing my error sooner and correcting myself.
Death is merely an inevitable condition accruing to all of us, regardless of what brings it on. So, I see it as irrelevant in and of itself. What I meant is that, once all there is to us is history, because WE ARE history :-) ..heh!...the person perpetrating the injustice will have come off worse than the person who suffered it. I believe this is what Socrates was thinking. Life is now, but the future is forever. So is the past. We don't remember the millions of faces-with-names who were tortured, killed, or otherwise diminished by the Nazis, as a typical example, but we sure know more about those who perpetrated those indignities. And not because we hold them in high regard.
The difference between Callicles and Socrates on the pleasure and the good is that Callicles does not take into consideration the structures of the pleasure or the pains he avoids whereas Socrates thinks that you have to take into consideration these structures."
So, according to Plato, Socrates preferred “suffering injustice” and actually committed "a philosophical suicide”. Is suicide still a greatest ethical choice available for us?