Summary
Socrates says Callicles is being inconsistent. He asks Callicles whether these "superior people," who are clever at ruling, can rule themselves. By rule themselves, Socrates means practice self-discipline by mastering their desires. Callicles rejects self-discipline as enslavement and says it is incompatible with happiness. By nature, he argues, “the only authentic way of life is to do nothing to hinder or restrain the expansion of one’s desires" (492a).
Further, Callicles argues that only the timid cannot find satisfaction in their pleasures, and so attempt to enslave the strong by conventions that condemn self-indulgence. “Sensual, self-indulgent freedom” is the best and happiest state of existence (492c). Socrates praises Callicles' frankness and asks whether “the idea that people who need nothing are happy is wrong?” Yes, Callicles says, because people without desires may as well be dead or stones, because it would be very boring to have no desires to satisfy.
Now Socrates introduces the analogy of a leaky jar. The part of the mind that contains desire, Socrates posits, is like a jar that leaks until one learns to close it properly. Through a series of puns, he makes it clear that the philosophically-initiated know how to close this jar, keeping their desires sealed off. A "fool" is anyone with a leaky lid, and their existence chasing these invisible desires is no better than the invisible existence of those shades in Hades. He recalls Euripides observation that in some senses, life is death and death is life, because death frees the soul for higher contemplation, while life buries the soul in the inessential.
Socrates shifts metaphors to make the point about the labor of filling jars with certain types of things, and describes the misery of such constant labor without end. But Callicles is still unconvinced. He maintains that satisfying desires is always pleasurable. Socrates turns to the lowly example of itching and the plight of the male prostitute.
Callicles refuses to say that any pleasure could possibly be bad and claims that the good and the pleasurable are the same. Provisionally accepting this assumption, Socrates begins anew on the topic of knowledge. Following the distinction between knowledge and courage, Callicles and Socrates agree that knowledge is also distinct from pleasure (but pleasure is still equal to good).
Socrates compares the state of living well to eye health. An eye is either infected or healthy, but cannot be both at the same time. Strength and weakness, speed and slowness work this way as well. Like good and bad, which are opposites, one cannot possess two opposites at the same time.
Now Socrates retuns to desire and pleasure. Callicles concedes that states of desire are “unpleasant.” Socrates argues that feeling thirsty and drinking would mean feeling pleasant and unpleasant at the same time. But just as it is impossible to be good and bad at once, it is impossible to feel pleasant and unpleasant at the same time. Pleasure cannot be living well if it can coexist with distress/displeasure. Good and bad do not exist in one person at the same time.
Because something can be "good-looking" without having any qualities that constitute "Good," what we find pleasurable is not always necessarily good. Cowards and heroes are examples of bad and good. Both experience pleasure and distress, but cowards feel both more intensely. They are more afraid in battle, and therefore more relieved when they desert their post. It follows then that both good and bad people always feel amounts of pleasure and distress that balance each other out: the amount of pleasure being equivalent to the amount of distress that it relieves. But because cowardly people feel more pleasure, we would have to conclude—if we accept Callicles' equation of pleasure with good—that they are more good. This is a contradiction, since we started out with the coward as the example of the bad.
Now, Callicles responds by arguing that there are different kinds of pleasure. Some aim toward the good, and others toward the bad. Socrates reaffirms the conclusion with Polus that the Good is not a means but a goal of all action if it is good. Socrates asserts that an expert is required to separate good from bad pleasures. Callicles agrees.
One way to distinguish between good and bad is expertise. This means knowing the reasons why something is good or bad. Another way is to learn slowly from habit, to develop a "knack." Again, Socrates compares the first to medicine and the second to cooking. The doctor wants to know why certain things make us feel good or bad. The cook is only interested in producing pleasure, without giving much thought to how or why, or what its lasting effects are. The cook is a kind of flatterer, because he produces pleasure without asking what is ultimately bad or good.
Socrates also gives the examples of music and theater, saying that tragedy is more interested in gratification without improvement. Poetry (which in Greece would have included tragedy), is only a kind of popular oratory, once you strip it of ornament (rhythm and music and meter). And popular oratory is also known as rhetoric. Rhetoricians, like poets, are unconcerned with improving their assemblies.
Proper public oration must be aimed at perfecting the audience. Like a craftsman (shipwright or painter), the “good man” speaks to promote organization and order, to make other men good like an orderly and stable house. The same then must be true of the mind, which is ordered by “laws” and “conventions” like self-control and justice.
Filling the unhealthy body with decadent food and drink will not help it get better, and it can even harm it. The same is true for the mind. One should not flatter the immoral or self-indulgent. Callicles is forced to admit that discipline is better for the mind than indulgence, but he cannot fully accept Socrates' point. Socrates accuses Callicles of refusing the good being offered him. Callicles leaves the argument.
Analysis
This section explores a crucial theme in Plato, that of desire. It begins, however, with a consideration of nature. Callicles' argument about nature is a fairly straightforward one: some people are strong and others are weak, therefore it only makes sense that the strong should have more than the weak. By the same token, Callicles argues, it makes sense that the intelligent should rule the stupid. When people attempt to deny these self-evident facts, they are merely following "convention"—that is, they are embarrassed that other people will think that they are immoral or cruel.
Callicles links this argument to a philosophy of hedonism, or the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. Unlike Socrates, who believes that the desires are tyrannical masters, Callicles believes that the highest good is for the strong to enjoy their strength, to do what they want without fear of judgment. Desire is natural, and should therefore be indulged, not restrained. Life without desire would be colorless; everything joyful in life comes from pleasure.
Socrates argues the opposite. He argues that, since one can only desire what one does not have, the pursuit of desire can never satisfy us. We will always want something else. Therefore, chasing after desires is like chasing after the shades of the dead in the underworld: each thing that we think we want proves to be completely insubstantial when we actually get our hands on it, and we chase after something else.
At stake here is a central aspect of Plato's worldview, and that is that fundamentally, our desires are destructive, and corrosive to our lasting happiness. This is perhaps one of the most obviously Christian aspects of Plato's philosophy, and it dovetails with his metaphysics: everything that is immediate, that is pleasurable, is suspect; we need to go beyond our bodies and our senses towards what is eternal and true, no matter how bad it makes us feel. The world is filled with people who are blindly following their desires, wondering why they are unhappy.
Though Callicles' brusque and unreflective character makes him highly unsympathetic to the reader, he is the only one of the interlocutors to offer a convincing alternative to Socrates' worldview. Callicles argues, simply, that desire and pleasure are good. To conceive of oneself as a wanting being, capable of feeling pleasure, is the closest to freedom that we can achieve on earth. Socrates counters this argument once again by contrasting the pleasurable and the good, but the different conceptions of human nature—and of the value and meaning of pleasure—are worth noting here.
But, more than desire, the conflict between Callicles and Socrates is about limits. Callicles believes not just in pleasure, but in pleasure without limits, the constant fulfilling of desire. Socrates, by contrast, believes in restraint and balance. Philosophy sets limits to our goals and desires, and thereby makes them achievable and durable.
Also worth noting is Socrates' skepticism of the arts, a theme that would be explored more fully in Plato's Republic. Plato is one of the few canonical philosophers (the other is th18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau) to argue plainly that art is bad, because it causes us to confuse the fake and the real, and because it damages our moral faculties by causing us to cry for people who don't exist. This skepticism runs counter to some of the theatrical aspects of Plato's dialogues that we have identified in previous sections. Seen in this light, Socrates' arguments against pleasure (including artistic pleasure) seem much harsher than Callicles' views, who had initially seemed to have the harder, more inhumane viewpoint.
