Having A Nietzsche Moment

Presented at the annual May 4th Philosophy Graduate student conference, 2000, as “Having a Nietzsche moment.” The subsequent section “Having an ironic moment” was added in light of comments at the conference.

HAVING A NIETZSCHE MOMENT: SOCRATES AND CALLICLES By Mike Monaco What I want to examine is the problem of rational justification as a kind of force, and how it compares to physical force. Throughout this paper I will use dialectics as an apt representative of all rational discourse, justification, argument, and debate, and I hope I will be forgiven this simplification. Dialectics, I think, are a good representative of rational discourse. In dialectics, questions are asked, and answers must be supported with reasons. This is the essence of rational justification. While perhaps not the inventor, truly the master of dialectics is Plato’s Socrates. How Socrates handles himself in the Gorgias, particularly in his exchange with Callicles, throws a great deal of light on the dialectical method. In the Gorgias, Socrates engages in dialectics with three orators in turn: Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. Although the question that sparks Socrates’ inquiry is the nature of oratory, the discussion quickly develops into a discussion of justice, and whether it is better to be unjust or to suffer injustice. Gorgias and Polus eventually come to agree with Socrates that it is better to suffer injustice than to be unjust, but Callicles is a holdout. Callicles insists that to be unjust is better, and that Socrates has confused and misled the others by confounding what is unjust by nature and what is unjust by law. By

nature, he says, it is just that we should abuse our inferiors, claim a greater share in all things, and generally ignore the rights of others. It is only by law that men seek to be fair and considerate of others, and indeed this is because the laws were created by the weak to control the strong, to keep them in check and at the same time to give the weak an equal footing with the strong. Callicles contrasts this state of affairs with justice as nature would have it: But I believe that nature itself reveals that it’s a just thing for the better man, the more capable man, to have a greater share than the worse and less capable man. Nature shows this is so in many places; both among the other animals and in whole cities and races of men, it shows that this is what justice has been decided to be: that the superior rule the inferior and have a greater share than they. For what sort of justice did Xerxes go by when he campaigned against Greece, or his father when he campaigned against Scythia? Countless other examples could be mentioned. I believe that these men do these things in accordance with the nature of what’s just – yes, by Zeus, by the law of nature, and presumably not with the one we institute. (Gorgias 483c-e) After several pages of Callicles’ speech, Socrates begins to engage Callicles in dialectics to test what he has said, and begins by summarizing what he thinks Callicles is saying. Socrates’ restatement of Callicles’ position emphasizes the role of physical force in Callicles’ account of what is just by nature: Socrates: What is it that you and Pindar hold to be true of what's just by nature? That the superior should take by force what belongs to the inferior, that the better should rule the worse and the more worthy have a greater share than the less worthy? Callicles: Yes, that's what I was saying then, and I still say so now, too. (488b) Although Callicles affirms Socrates’ restatement, I was struck by the central role given to physical force. Callicles’ first statement of his position seems more like an aristocratic rant than an appeal to brute force. But Callicles will admit that by “better” and “superior” he also means stronger, and so Socrates has laid bare Callicles’ basic argument. Socrates finds himself in an awkward position: he must not only show that

Callicles’ position is wrong, but also get Callicles to accept rational discourse, rather than physical force, as the proper method of settling disputes. Socrates is unable to reason with Callicles, though, because Callicles refuses to play by Socrates’ rules. At various points in the dialogue, Callicles mocks Socrates’ use of mundane examples (490d,e), claims not to see any connection between his arguments and the particular examples Socrates raises (497a-c), refuses to answer Socrates (505a506c), and modifies his position merely to skirt around Socrates’ refutations (441c). The dialogue is almost painful to observe. Socrates doggedly tries a number of tactics to show Callicles, by reductio ad absurdum, that his claims are not consistent and cannot all be true. But Callicles is obstinate and is clearly unfazed by each new maneuver Socrates makes. Callicles refuses to see any connection between his inability to give a consistent account of his beliefs and the validity of these beliefs. He says: This man will not stop talking nonsense! Tell me, Socrates, aren't you ashamed, at your age, of trying to catch people's words and making hay out of someone's tripping on words? (489b-c) But surely Socrates is not merely practicing eristics – the rhetorical technique of Sophists used to refute others with verbal tricks. Callicles seems to see the dialogue as a sort of contest, perhaps because as a proponent of physical force, he expects rational discourse to have the same ends as physical games. But the point is not to “win” the argument, but to lay bare and test ideas. There is more at stake than the pride of winning. Socrates takes the whole discussion, and its outcome, more seriously than that, and he enjoins Callicles to do the same: “For you see, don’t you, that our discussion’s about ... the way we’re supposed to live.” (500c) There is often much more at stake in philosophical disagreements than winning and losing. If the details sometimes run into erudite and esoteric matters, any

philosopher worth his salt must hasten to add at once that the questions we ask are important and relevant to daily life, and to the purpose and end of life. Surely such matters are too important to be decided by anything other than reason. As it happens, Callicles was willing to use Socrates’ dialectical method, at least until the tide of the discussion turned against him. What recourse does Socrates have when Callicles changes the rules of engagement? At this point the listener will likely have noticed the martial language I’ve been using. It has been remarked that argument is war in western society, and the tactical considerations necessary to fight an actual battle effectively have their analogues in establishing a battleground for rational discourse. Consider warfare in ancient Greece. The city-state usually consisted of an urban center in some defensible location, arable land surrounding the city, and at the outskirts, the rugged, wasted land suitable only for grazing sheep. But two city-states in conflict usually were quarreling over this rugged mountainous terrain at their extreme limits, as when one or the other city-states’ shepherds took their flocks into the rival state’s land. Did the battles that would reestablish boundaries take place just anywhere? Not at all. Level fields, often far from the disputed area, were used. This is because tactically, the heavily armed hoplite armies could fight effectively only on level ground. The battles staged on open fields also followed fairly definite rules about the exchange of missles, the exchange of taunts and challenges, and the final charge which led to the decisive melee. It should be noted that describing Greek warfare as aimed at producing “decisive” battles does not mean that the Greeks aimed for wholesale slaughter and extermination. Greek warfare aimed at producing battles that could effectively settle the disputes – one army had to back down and submit to the other. To be decisive, one

phalanx needed to force the other from the field. Because heavy armor and large shields provided excellent protection, the battles were not particularly lethal by any standards, ancient or modern. A hoplite battle could be decided before the phalanxes even collided, if one side broke and fled upon seeing the ferocious charge of its opponents. And even in the shock of impact, the melee between phalanxes usually involved pushing and shoving, rather than just stabbing with spears, to break each other’s formation. This “shoving match” had the dual effects of making the battle decided by strength, and also decreasing the lethality of the melee. The “stronger” city-state wins by demonstrating its superior strength on the field – just as Callicles claims. However by adhering to rules of engagement, warfare among Greek city-states could minimize lethality while maintaining decisiveness. Just so do rational arguments often need to be artificially staged, not necessarily where they arise but where they can be effectively settled. The Greeks imposed a set of rules on warfare because they wanted to assure that each engagement would be decisive. Settling a dialectical question requires rules as well, and Socrates himself often gives his interlocutors specific instructions with this object in view. I will return to Socrates’ rules in a bit. Beyond these somewhat superficial comparisons of war and argument it is important to bring to mind another feature of war: that war has more at stake than winning or losing the conflict. Throughout history, wars have been as much between ways of living as between armed forces. Think about the steppe nomads pouring out of central Asia in Later Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Attila the Hun and the Mongol khans fought not just to defeat their foes but to gain pasture land for their herds, and spread their way of life. They did not merely claim the lands they conquered but reduced

cities to fields. The nomadic way of life does not require conquests so much as grazing land. The war of ideas is critically important not for the ideas themselves but for the ways of life they represent. As mentioned earlier, Callicles’ position is a challenge not just to Socrates’ rhetorical skills but to his whole way of life. What is at issue is not simply “what is justice” but whether it is better to live ruled by rationality or by physical force. The fundamental challenge of communication is finding a common ground. We need to reach some agreement about HOW to talk or argue, WHAT is at issue, WHEN an attack, defense, or other maneuver is successful, and finally what the “force” of a conclusion reached is. The last three issues, I think, really depend on the first: HOW to engage in discussion. The critical question is just how we will conduct discussion, debate, and disagreement. As a philosopher I am, of course, biased toward using reason and logic as the final arbiter of disputes. But what about situations like the one in which Socrates is presently engaged? How does one justify rational justification? What reasons support the appeal to reason? These considerations led me to what I sometimes call a Nietzsche moment. This happens whenever I come to the realization that just the same cluster of questions has been raised and pondered by Nietzsche. I find Nietzsche to be an excellent source for starting points, although I rarely find myself in agreement with his conclusions. In fact, Nietzsche not only asked similar questions about the justification of rational discourse, he even made specific reference to Socrates as a symbol of the problem itself. By Nietzsche’s account, rationality like Socrates’ is another kind of force: it does not create rational consensus but overpowers and forces one, often by shame, to agree with another:

As a dialectican one is in possession of a pitiless instrument; with its aid one can play the tyrant; one compromises by conquering. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to demonstrate he is not an idiot: he enrages, he at the same time makes helpless. The dialectician devitalizes his opponent's intellect. (Twilight of the Idols, The Problem of Socrates, section 7) The thing to notice is that Nietzsche suggests that reasoning, particularly the finely sharpened reasoning of dialectics, is itself a kind of bullying and forcing. Nietzsche is good at reading power struggles into a wide spectrum of activities, and indeed all of life, in a manner less sympathetic readers might see as paranoid. But I am sympathetic to Nietzsche’s cries of “foul” when Socrates makes his interlocutors look foolish. Socrates’ persistent questioning of his interlocutors, and their eventual aporia, often looks like the intellectual equivalent of the glasses-stomping scene in Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run.” We don’t need to see symptoms of decadence in dialectics, as Nietzsche does, to recognize the potential for abuses of reason. So what do I make of this? Nietzsche has suggested that dialectics can exert a force to defeat others, by humiliating them. I suspect that anyone here can recall or imagine a situation where the demand for justification or reasons was used aggressively, not to clarify but as an attack, and even not just to attack positions but to attack persons. As a teacher, the opportunity to be the intellectual bully arises often enough. But of course reason is not inherently bad, either, and all this points to a need for restraint. Socrates, aware of this need for restraint himself, presents several rules of engagement for dialectics. First, there is the often repeated call for brevity in questioning and answering. (e.g. 449c, and throughout the Protagoras) I will not dwell too long on this point, because I think the call for brevity is mainly a way of asking others not to engage in oratory but in reasoning. The more important rules involve bringing three things to rational dispute: knowledge, good will, and frankness. (487a) Add an awareness,

courtesy of Nietzsche, that putting others to shame should be avoided, and we have a workable set of rules of engagement for rational discourse that is not forced or oppressive, but still effective and potentially decisive. Socrates’ call for bringing knowledge to debate should be fairly easy to understand. Any honest attempt at rational discourse requires that we bring to bear all that we know, or think we know, that is relevant to the subject at hand. The problem of course is the limited and often erroneous bank of knowledge each of us has. This immediately brings to the fore the other requirements of good will and frankness. We need to be frank or honest with ourselves and with those we seek to reason with regarding our knowledge. Socrates would no doubt be the first to attest to problems arising from false claims of knowledge. A good will is important because even rigid and exhaustive rules are helpless against the mean-spirited approach that twists, bends, and exploits rules. We need to maintain restraint, and this is best accomplished by keeping in mind that argument need not be “war to the dagger and dagger to the hilt,” but can often be decisive without bringing shame to any participant. Finally frankness is worth emphasizing for a number of reasons. As just mentioned, it is helpful to be honest about our limits with respect to knowledge. But it is also good to be frank regarding our motives. Are we arguing to win a dispute, to settle (or unsettle) a question, to identify ambiguities, to raise questions, or to test ourselves? Hostile arguments often develop just because one or both parties are unwilling to be clear about what they are trying to do. Finally, a frank admission of each side’s actual view, and not giving “for the sake of the argument” qualifiers, will spare everyone frustration. The ancient Greek way of war is an example of the potential for restrained and

yet decisive engagements of physical force; I submit that it is likewise possible to develop a way of arguing which is restrained and decisive as well, and that a good starting point is the dialectical method of Socrates. But what are the prospects for demonstrating that reasoning, rational discourse, is a better way of settling disputes than physical force? I find myself as helpless here as Socrates was when he faced Callicles. In the Gorgias, Socrates could only try a series of arguments, each refuting Callicles, but Callicles would shrug off each conclusion. The force of rational conclusions, clearly, exist only subjectively, unlike the physical force which we are not free to ignore. Among people of knowledge, frankness, and good will, the superiority of rational force is manifest: it has no “innocent” or unwilling victims, unlike physical force. Submitting to rational force is a choice; submitting to physical force is not. If argument is war, at least it is a war that only ever involves committed “combatants” and not “civilians.” HAVING AN IRONIC MOMENT At this point, let us take stock of the situation. In the preceding remarks I noted (1) that rational discourse itself is a kind of forcing; (2) that it can be compared to physical force, especially military force, in a way which provides both some insight into the nature of forcing and some possible constraints for the use of forces; and (3) that Socrates’ own guidelines for dialectics may provide a set of rules or constraints for the use of rational force. A Nietzsche moment earlier in this meditation signaled the need for constraints for rational discourse. Now a moment of irony calls the three propositions above into question for me. I say I’m having an ironic moment now because there is much that is not said in the first half of this paper. First, I have uncritically used some martial language and a

fundamentally martial metaphor in the above discussion. I unabashedly wrote that ARGUMENT IS WAR .

It may well be that argument can be understood as kind of conflict, a

contest between minds and bodies much as is war. This in fact is a particularly apt description of what Socrates might call eristics – a verbal contest of the sort Sophists delight in, where winning and losing is everything. The metaphor that “argument is war” is of course well-born out by our language, where we speak of attacking positions, defending a thesis, using strategy and maneuvers in our argument, and the like. Indeed, the very notion of “winning an argument” makes sense because wars too can be won. But suppose we challenge this metaphor. Suppose we declare not that “argument is war” but that ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY. The difference is enormous. When we think of argument and rational discourse as a kind of war, we highlight the controversy and confrontation of argument, but we hide a great deal as well. Don’t at least some arguments have the goal of changing another’s mind? Don’t we sometimes argue just to understand another’s point of view? When I ask you why you believe in God, or vote Republican, I may begin an argument just to attack your position, but surely I could argue with you just to lay bare your reasons (and mine!); just to understand your thinking. In that case, the argument is a journey. As we argue, we may lead each other at times and at other times follow. The journey may cause us to reach the same destination, or it may lead us each onto different paths. Imagine, for example, that I did argue with you about political parties. Couldn’t I be trying to understand your position, or in some way asking you to understand mine? Couldn’t I ask you about your “reasons” for your position not because I’m probing for weaknesses and avenues of attack but just so that I can understand them? [more on arg. as journey: some entailments, etc]

This conception of argument, as a journey, seems to me to be very much how Socrates envisioned his dialectics. Does Socrates ask Euthyphro about piety just to attack Euthyphro? Does Socrates really try to defeat the orators in the Gorgias? No, this is not Socrates’ design. He is leading others on a journey of self-discovery. It is true that the adversarial attitudes of most of his interlocutors causes many dialogues to end badly – Euthyphro takes leave of Socrates without ever admitting that he can’t define piety; Callicles never questions the legitimacy of his life of oratory, and so on. But at least for the reader, and occasionally for interlocutors as well, Socrates’ dialectics lead to a new understanding. Socrates himself is often ironic, both in the sense of using sarcasm and in the sense that he leaves it to others to discover their destination. A particularly ironic moment in the Gorgias occurs when Socrates credits Callicles with frankness, goodwill, and knowledge. As the dialogue progresses, it becomes manifest that Callicles is not frank (for he does change his arguments for the sake of “winning”), Callicles does not have a good will (for he makes it clear that cares only about himself and not about what is good), and Callicles does not have real knowledge (as is evidenced by his failure to define the key concepts in his theory, such as what makes one man “better” than another). But the irony goes deeper. Socrates carries Callicles’ statements to their logical but outrageous and inconsistent conclusions. He shows clearly what is wrong with Callicles’ argument, but does not explicitly say what it is. Here Socrates is silent because he does not mean to force Callicles into submission, only to lead him along a path. This is the second piece of irony I see in the earlier discussion, then. Socrates himself never meant his dialectics to be a kind of contest that is constrained by frankness,

goodwill, and knowledge. Frankness, goodwill, and knowledge all serve to ensure that an argument is not about winning someone over to ones’ position but instead that the argument will be a journey. Frank participants will be willing to say where they are, not posture and boast like a warrior going into battle. Goodwill ensures that the participants are seeking to share and follow the path of the dialogue, not force their way to their own objectives and conclusions. Knowledge, finally, reinforces the frankness and goodwill. The greatest knowledge for Socrates, after all, is self-knowledge, which is clearly required for frankness, and an interest in gaining knowledge rather than victories is the essence of goodwill in dialogue. One last point about which I remained silent concerns the historical examples. It is true that in set-piece battles, the Greeks followed a rigid format or set of rules. But there are several situations where the rules of warfare did not apply, and perhaps this exposes the basic error of seeking rules to contain force. One situation, which really suggested itself when Socrates and Callicles begin their part of the dialogue, is when the Greeks faced non-Greek enemies. The lines of close-order hoplites were a match for other close-order armies, and could even deal with lighter troops such as the archers and javelin-men fielded by Persia. But in some situations, the phalanx was outmatched, as when the Greeks fought Scythians who fought with bows from horseback. The Scythians would not engage in melee but shoot and retreat, shoot and retreat, whittling down the phalanx until the formation lost cohesion and the hoplites broke ranks and fled. The rout led to great slaughter. Such a situation arises because the Greeks’ enemies do not have to follow their rules. Imagine Socrates’ plight had Callicles gone beyond his threats and physically assaulted Socrates. Another situation that undermines my claims about Greek constraints on warfare

is the siege. Many instances of warfare took place closer to home that the phalanx matches in the fields. The truly decisive end to a war often came about in a siege, where the city itself comes under attack. This may happen when a defeated army withdraws to the safety of city walls, or when a conflict has reached a level where not just the defeat but the destruction of an enemy is desired. Sieges in ancient times were bloody exceptions to the normal rules of engagement. If the city did not surrender, an attacking army would use force or guile gain entrance to the city, often with disastrous effects for the besieged. An army laying siege to a city may face prolonged, difficult labor to construct ramps and engines for the assault. The army would also suffer exposure to the elements and hunger in their camps if the siege was protracted, and finally suffer tremendous losses in the assault. Having endured and suffered much, frustration and anger boils over, and woe to the besieged! Ancient sources make it appallingly clear that cities that fell to sieges could expect a devastating rampage of brutality at the hands of looting soldiers. Often non-combatants such as women and children would perish alongside the men, or else face rape and slavery. Garrisons who fought valiantly may occasionally be spared out of respect but were more often tortured, mutilated, and killed. During and especially after a siege, no rules apply at all. So in some situations, rules and constraints on physical force may either fail or be completely discarded. This does not bode well for the prospects of a constrained conflict of intellects either. Indeed, I would submit that the impasse reached by Socrates and Callicles points not so much to need for constraints on rational force as a reconceptualization of rational force. The real lesson is not that argument, like war, can be limited. The lesson is that argument as war is subject to the same pitfalls as real war. If rational force is abused as Nietzsche describes, the remedy may be to change the

nature of the force rather than trying to contain it. Henceforth, let us try to imagine argument as a journey. Let reason exert force not as rapacious soldier but as a benevolent guide might. The real value of rational force does not lie in its ability to shame others into submission but in its ability to guide us by means of our intellectual conscience.