February 3
Monday, February 3, 2025Plenary
The Challenge of Callicles
Given that we have these desires, what do we do with them? Would fulfillment of your desires amount to your vision of a good life? How should one pursue one’s desires? As a starting point, we will look at the view of a character in Plato’s Gorgias named Callicles. Callicles seems to view happiness in terms of pleasure and the fulfillment of one’s desires, and extends this to claim that we are happier if we have stronger desires (so long as we are able to fulfill them). Power is the ability to experience maximal pleasure by satisfying our most intense desires, and rhetoric (the ability to persuade others to do what one wants) is the most powerful tool for gaining and exercising power. Socrates raises a number of critical questions about this vision, and claims that the fundamental choice a person faces in life is between this "rhetorical" way of life and the life of philosophy.
- Be familiar with Callicles’ view of the good life, and aware of alternative views (Plato, Kongzi)
- Understand Socratic challenges to Callicles’ position, the issues they present, and what they reveal about the sophistic/rhetorical orientation
- See how to make explicit objections and arguments out of text from a Platonic dialogue
- Appreciate why Plato views the choice between philosophical and rhetorical lives as the fundamental choice in how to live
Before Class
- Plato, Gorgias 482c–495c: Callicles’ “Great Speech” and initial discussion with Socrates — read in Perusall, making at least two comments with replies to someone else’s comment or question
- Trevor Newton, “A Summary of Plato’s Gorgias” — this is required background reading, but you do not need to comment on it in Perusall
- Optional: read entire dialogue from beginning — warning, it’s long!
- Complete the Mapping Desires Exercise and upload an image of your map to this Google Form before 10am on the day of today’s class (February 3); you’ll be considering your desire map further in your breakout class later this week.
- Try to summarize, in a sentence or two, Callicles’ view of the good life.
- Enumerate the concerns Socrates brings up about Callicles’ view.
- Read the two passages about the water carriers, and the scratcher and catamite. What seems to be the point of these examples?
After Class
- Slides for today’s lecture
- Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Gorgias,” chapter from A Short History of Ethics
- How to cite passages from a Platonic dialogue (and what those numbers in the margins are): Stephanus numbers