Callicles, The Ancient Nietzsche, Rips Democracy (Gorgias 5) 

I love you!! Best philosopher out there! When i can afford it, I will support your academy! Love your videos!

I find you brilliant and love your content. Thank you.

Dialoging about Nietzsche is not a normal part of my life, but a few weeks ago, pretty much out of the blue, someone emailed me describing Nietzsche’s argument about “slave morality.” The very next day happened to be when I got to Callicles’ argument! I was really shocked at the similarity. But if that wasn’t strange enough, within a day or two, someone posted a reply to one of my comments on a Schindler lecture from several weeks prior-and he used a very Callicles-like line of reasoning. I guess I’ll call those few days my “Callicles Concatenation.” I have no idea if coincidences have any larger meaning, but it did drive home for me how current this 2500-year-old dialogue still is. Lots of people out there want to believe that if they can impose their will on others, they’re just doing what’s “natural”-and even good-and that it proves that they’re a superior (more worldly, more manly, etc) type of person. To me, the mistake in this is that we end up focusing on a too-narrow portion of who we are-a too-narrow portion of our overall will. In our true, full will, we have very strong cooperative, relational tendencies that are more satisfying to act on. So maybe it is natural and good to assert our wills (which means I agree with Callicles-Nietzsche on this much), but it should be our true, full, relationship-oriented wills, not our partial, narrow, self-centered wills. But even if that’s correct, probably none of us is capable of acting accordingly in our fallen condition, so we still need salvation in Christ.

Let us distinguish state and society, descriptive philosophy and practical philosophy. Where morality exists differently - as bureaucratial mimicking, mode of living, as normative, as a tool.

6:30 I think Nietzsche said the same to Lou Salome.

Nice

I always sided Callicles until one of my professors pointed out that an union of "the weak" overpoweriing the "strong" is also a display of "strength". He was both a 2xPhD (philosophy and law) and a Opus Dei catholic extremist. Can't make a decent argument against that to this day

Can anyone give a description of the "contradiction" Socrates warns about? What kind of contradiction does he mean - moral ("emotional?"), logical, "practical"? Is it a contradiction between a set of propositions/maxims? I often think this contradiction is universal, because i encounter it so many times, yet I can't name it. Seems like the only way to avoid this contradiction is "anything goes", at least in principle, but this "anything goes" seems also contradicting to me. So what is the essence of this discussion?