Summary
Socrates now must continue his investigation alone, because his interlocutors refuse to cooperate. He continues to explain that the pleasant is different from the good. The good, which is the quality of lasting, durable organization and balance, should be the reason we do pleasant things. The quality of being pleasant leads to enjoyment, the quality of being good makes us good. Organization and perfection in any branch of expertise is good. A disciplined mind is good.
More specifically, order means acting appropriately to gods and men—that is, religiously and justly. One who acts religiously and justly is religious and just. A good person is successful and success leads to happiness. The reverse is true for unhappy people: self-indulgence will not bring success. Thus, the good person's self-discipline allows him to lead a happy life, but if he fails in his discipline, it would be best for him to be corrected.
The aim should be ensuring happiness for all through the creation of order. A man who refuses to restrain his desires will always be trying to satisfy himself, and this will prevent him from ever cooperating with others. The "power of geometric equality” among men and gods is the dictum that no one deserves more than any other. Socrates believes in the existence of cosmic mercy—the notion that imbalance created by an abuse of power will be righted in the end. Because of this cosmic tilt toward equality, Socrates says that rhetoric should be used to create harmony. Mercy is not bad, but those who do not believe in mercy are bad.
Socrates assists his interlocutors by explaining what they would have to prove to prove him wrong. They would have to prove that happiness does not depend on justice and self-discipline. Otherwise, we must accept that we require expertise to stop us from doing wrong, as well as expertise to show us how to do right. But Callicles still believes that our goal should be to avoid suffering wrong. This is not a viable concept from which we can build a concept of harmony.
Socrates rejects the assumption that this expertise should show us how to avoid wrong by flattering rulers or gaining power, as rhetoric does. Such expertise only shows us how to be liked by the ruler, which means sharing the ruler’s likes and dislikes—regardless of whether that ruler is good or bad. But this man will not have gained the ability to avoid doing wrong. In fact, he will only gain the ability to escape punishment for doing wrong.
Callicles has argued that rhetoric can teach you to avoid having wrong done to you. But Socrates points out that learning to swim can save your life without making you a better person. Turning to nonpolitical experts, Socrates argues that the helmsman knows his expertise has no effect on the moral core of the person he steers in his ship. The mechanic can also save lives without improving their moral character or his own.
Socrates turns back to public officials and considers how one is chosen. An architect would be interviewed about his education and existing work. Socrates says a statesman should be chosen based on his ability to improve the quality of life of the Athenian people, and this would mean that they must be willing to challenge common sense, and criticize wrong where they find it. Socrates asks Callicles whether Callicles' friendship has improved the moral character of any of his friends. This makes Callicles quite mad.
Socrates asks whether Pericles made Athenians better. Callicles thinks that he has, while Socrates says many people say no, and that the Athenians turned against Pericles in the end, presumably because Pericles had made them worse. Socrates compares the situation to a herdsman whose herd becomes fierce under his watch. He reminds us that Homer says to be docile is to be moral. Thus, statesmen whose careers ended with the people against them must not be good at improving their people.
Socrates makes the point that politicians like Pericles were fine statesmen insofar that they met the needs of the state—managing building projects, supervising defense, etc.—but that they did not fulfill the role of good members of the community by improving the morality of its members. Again, Socrates contrasts professions that provide for the desires of the body, like those who sell clothing, with those who make it truly healthy, like doctors. The politicians Callicles has praised have simply saddled the city with vices that the current statesmen—Callicles and Alcibiades included—must cure.
Socrates points out that teaching virtue is a unique kind of profession, because one demands no compensation for one's work. Teaching morality makes one more moral, and so the person who provides this good service is also its beneficiary. Socrates argues that he is the only true statesman in Athens, because he is the only person who cares not only for his own well-being, but for the good that he does to others. Callicles observes that if Socrates were ever accused of a crime, he would have a difficult time defending himself without the aid of rhetoric.
Socrates closes by describing the cosmos according to the poet Homer. According to the old legends, any human being who has lived a good life will spend eternity on the Isles of Blessed. Everyone else goes to Tartarus, where they are punished for their sins. When Zeus, Poseidon and Pluto overthrew the old gods, they made one crucial change to this system: they made it so that all souls would be judged not as they were in life, under the cover of wealth and nobility and outward appearance, but in death, stripped absolutely naked. Socrates says that rulers are always punished most harshly, because they have the greatest opportunity to do wrong. Socrates tells Callicles that, just as he, Socrates, might not know what to say before an Athenian jury, Callicles will be just as speechless when he is stripped naked and his soul is judged.
Socrates closes by challenging his interlocutors to offer better arguments than the ones he has given. He restates the importance of training oneself to be virtuous.
Analysis
Socrates' story of the final judgment is in many ways the forbearer of Christianity. In fact, Nietzsche once called Christianity "Platonism for the masses." After such a long discussion of morality and insisting that there is no more important consideration for man on earth, Socrates has concluded that the final definition is beyond any man's earthly grasp.
On the one hand, this is consistent with the life-affirming aspect of his methodology. Because one must constantly test one's beliefs in conversation with other people, one must be constantly open to the possibility that one's knowledge is imperfect, and seek improvement with other people. On the other hand, it denies the possibility that one could ever act from a place of certainty, and Euripedes' quote ("who knows if we are alive or dead?") expresses the total ambivalence of this situation.
Furthermore, because Socrates turns to this myth at the end, it seems as though he has been unable to argue the case for philosophy. If we grant Plato the benefit of the doubt, we can read the story metaphorically rather than as a direct presentation of a metaphysical system. That is to say that he is not arguing that the reason to do right is because one will be punished after death—this would be a metaphysical justification, because it relies on an unknowable cosmic order—but rather using the image of an afterlife or a naked soul to illustrate his point that when one does wrong, one is really hurting themselves.
But there's a big problem here. If the final myth is meant to be read metaphorically, then that means that Socrates is himself using the highly stylized strategies of rhetoric. It may be that he can only make his case for philosophy in the province of its declared enemy: sophistry. Indeed, sophistry is considered a branch of philosophy by today's standards. One must ask oneself why Socrates would want to separate philosophy from the verbal arts in the first place. In the end, Socrates does believe that moral rulers could emerge, so he must think the project is real and has the potential to succeed.
We should also remember that Socrates has referred to Pythagoras as a story-teller. This famous philosopher was one of the first "Pre-Socratic" philosophers. These were the earliest practitioners of philosophy in the ancient world, and what distinguished them from thinkers before them was their desire to explain the world and its phenomena as it was. This meant a departure from the mythic world order, which explained natural phenomena in terms of the god's personalities—for example, Mars created war, and storms indicated martial trouble between Zeus and Hera. To call Pythagoras a story-teller, then—as Socrates does—is to intentionally invert Pythagoras' place in the transition from mythical thinking to philosophy. If Pythagoras—one of the first philosophers—was himself a "story-teller"—that is to say, in some sense, a rhetorician—then are we so sure that Socrates' philosophy has succeeded in distinguishing itself from rhetoric? Socrates' use of the "myth" of the final judgment should lead us to question this, to say the least.
It is also worth noticing that Socrates has raised the value of storytelling in the previous section with Callilcles. He asked: "will it make no difference at all to what you think if I tell you story after story with the same moral?" (493d). As we saw, despite all the stories, Callilcles does not really change his mind. And sure enough, story-telling is not the method that Socrates has been promoting throughout the text. But we should heed his warning to Gorgias and not "get lost in mere words."
