Fiachra Long ||

We live at a time in the Western world when the moral values of free speech and universal care have been inverted by a strange form of oligarchic-speak and even stranger forms of economics designed to favour the rich and the strong. This ‘might is right’ idea is not new. Nor is there any compelling evidence to show that it works in the long term as a political ideal. Plato, as a young man, experienced this strange trickery with language and this advocacy of power in Athens, which motivated him to explore the issue in several of his dialogues, especially the Gorgias. Gorgias himself, an elderly sophist and a kind teacher of public speaking, appears only briefly in the dialogue and seems genuinely shocked at the thought that some of his pupils, to whom he imparted the skills of public speaking, might not use this art for the promotion of justice in society but rather use it to benefit themselves and their friends. Being famous seems to have been the underlying motivation of Polus, Thrasymachus (who appears in the Republic) and Callicles, whom Socrates engages in the central debate of the dialogue. It is impossible to look at this dialogue without noting parallels between the rise of the oligarchy in Athens in 404 BCE and contemporary Trumpism. To found politics on power and verbal manipulation contradicted Plato’s emerging idea that only education and the values of truth and goodness could actually found a social polity. The sustainability of any polity requires people to maintain truthful communication with one another and to undertake to serve the common good. Otherwise, with neither truth nor goodness in prospect, communication can be used to hoodwink and manipulate people in the interests of forms of self- aggrandisement that may initially be presented as social improvement but ultimately deal in death.

On speaking and influencing in the Greek context

Leadership in Athens during Plato’s life (427–347 BCE) required aspirants to show competence in public speaking, the equivalent in today’s culture of regularly attracting big hits on a social media platform or even starring in a reality TV show. This may explain why wandering teachers, traditionally known as sophists, could earn a good living by coaching young aristocrats in the art of decorative language and public speaking. The young aristocrats of Athens could easily believe that the skill of becoming a leader in society depended on their ability to use their public speeches to manipulate the crowd to think as they thought. Polus, one of the characters in the Gorgias, instinctively believed that he would become famous if he learned to speak well. His ambition was to become ‘an influencer’ in Athenian society, someone who would be listened to in determining new laws for the city. This would make the city great again, just as great as when Pericles repulsed the Persian army less than a hundred years before. Irrespective of whether Polus had any deep insights into the laws of the city, he was confident that he could use literature and poetry to persuade others that he had the education to be a leader. By making words beautiful and appealing, and drawing the admiration of the crowd, everyone could believe that he was a true leader, someone who knew the ‘truth social’ and would lead the city from strength to strength.

The important thing for an influencer at the time was to be well thought of by others and to be respected as someone who ‘gets things done around here’. Decorative speech could mould the masses and, as a type of mimicry, the anonymous masses could be roused in their desire to be powerful themselves.¹¹ This process involved something that resembled flattery.² But how? You simply flatter others for supporting you, and they flatter you for flattering them. People could identify greatness with the speaker who seemed to speak well whereupon they could then claim on that account to be great themselves. Simple really. A simple delusion. While Plato had no objection to decorative speech-making in itself, he recognised from bitter experience in his own family that this imitative use of words and texts, concocted with a manipulative purpose, largely avoided the issue of justice and set up parallel accounts of reality. The absence of any sense of justice irked Plato because it undermined good governance as he imagined it. He recognised the signs of this failing not only in Polus but also in Thrasymachus, whom he described in the Phaedrus as knowing ‘how to inflame the crowd and, once they are inflamed, how to hush them again with the magic spell of his words’, and who was ‘as good at producing slander as he is at refuting it, whatever its source may be’.³ What is missing is the importance of truth and indeed the ability to communicate with those who are not enticed to join the supporting group. In addition, power seems at a loss to guarantee loyalty even though it might appear to do so for a time. Socrates makes this observation to Callicles further on in the text:

Well, Callicles, if human beings didn’t share common experiences, some sharing one, others sharing another, but one of us had some unique experience not shared by others, it wouldn’t be easy for him to communicate what he experienced to the other.⁴

So one way to make speakers like Polus, Thrasymachus, or Callicles into sharers of common experience would be to arouse in them the quest for the truth. Open leaders would develop the ability to communicate with a wide range of other potential leaders, even citizens who might not be supporters, and this would mean tolerating different views and negotiating different outcomes. Plato had experienced a particular failure to do this in the city of Athens in his early life. He had seen oligarchic power erupt in a very naked fashion in his aristocratic circle. His mother’s cousin, Critias, had led the revolt of the Thirty Tyrants in 404 BCE and proved to be quite a brutal leader; he was responsible for the execution of an estimated 1500 Athenians when they refused to accept the Sparta-led oligarchy. Other members of Plato’s family participated in the coup, including his uncle, Charmides, but Plato consistently refused to be drawn into this civil strife and opted instead to follow the path inspired by his teacher, Socrates. Following the coup of 404 and the counter coup several months later, Plato felt it safer to leave Athens for a period of years.

Polus knows ‘how things are done around here’, and so he reproaches Socrates (and the future educator Plato) for his naivety. Might is right. He doesn’t have to learn anything from Socrates because, in his view, Socrates really doesn’t have what it takes to teach him anything important. Socrates belongs to the class of artisans. His talents would not make Athens great again or return it to the golden age of Pericles. Socrates, in his view, was a bit of a nobody.

It is clear that Plato did not see things that way. He knew that just as the oligarchy thought to impose itself on Athens in the belief that it would manage the city better than the democracy that went before, and this led to considerable violence, any unprincipled grip on power would certainly lead to excesses too. This is why Plato, in the dialogue, imagines Socrates’ advice to Polus to avoid long speeches where he might be inclined to blow himself up as the centre of attention and instead engage more wholeheartedly in open-ended debate: ‘Take your turn in asking and being asked questions the way Gorgias and I did, and subject yourself and me to refutation.’⁵

However, Polus lacks the confidence to engage in refutation of this kind and prefers to fall back on ready-made speech-making, the equivalent of an X (Twitter) account today. He might have made his case stronger, if he had engaged further in the verbal tussle with Socrates, and if he had withstood the challenge of Socratic cross-examination, but he did not last the pace and soon surrendered the floor to Callicles, who in the end proved to be more resilient. It is easier to shape an argument offstage, as it were, than to engage in the cut and thrust of an honest dialogue where listening and responding could put any theory to the test. It is just as easy today to push out an online video claiming to be an influencer than to have to engage with arguments and counter-arguments or even learn to back up opinion by facts. The problem here is that autocratic leaders tend to imagine the opposition’s position rather than listen to it and learn from it. Indeed no one learns anything new from a harangue.

Indeed, this leads to a more sinister feature of the ‘might is right’ idea. It is not the headstrong impulses of Polus or Thrasymachus’ claim to ‘know how things are done around here’ that causes real worry but rather the way their speaking competence can so easily migrate into support for violence. Callicles follows this trend when he dismisses Socrates as a dreamer, someone given over to the childish speculations of philosophy where the prospect of political leadership is lost in prevarication. In the text, Callicles speaks derisorily of philosophy and all the debating that goes with it. Philosophy may be an ‘elegant accomplishment’ for a younger person but ‘if a man indulges in it and carries it on in later life, he will be ignorant of the things which a gentleman ought to know’.⁶ Indeed, Eric Voegelin suggests that the text here may well rehearse the objections Plato faced as a young man when he opted for philosophy rather than politics, even though he belonged to the aristocratic class.⁷ Practising philosophy beyond its (childish) time should even, in the opinion of Callicles, warrant further sanctions as it becomes ‘ridiculous and unmanly and deserving of a flogging’.⁸ Aristophanes dramatised this view in comic form in The Clouds (423 BCE), where Socrates is portrayed as a dreamer playing on a swing. These derisory images of Socrates tip easily into violence, as they did at his trial in 399 BCE. Here Callicles opposes Socrates’s entire way of life, his way of relating to reality, his philosophical attitude, his appetite for puzzling things out, his insistence on the renewable and non-dogmatic character of all knowledge, his preference for disputation and the quest for truth over ready-made speeches.

Callicles, as a result, has banished all thoughts of justice from his thinking. He sees life as a choice between nature (power) and law (the ploy of the weak), a common trope of the time.⁹ Callicles complains that Socrates uses this distinction to trick people in argument, switching from one base (nature) to the other (law) by means of his examples to cause confusion and gain victory in debate. Wise to this, Callicles insists on the primacy of nature, the primacy of strength, over any other value. Accordingly, he dismisses the prevarication of Socrates and indeed morality itself as a form of weakness. For him, the law is the refuge of the weak, giving them safeguards that they do not naturally deserve. He believes, as Nietzsche will suggest later, that the knowledgeable should have power over the ignorant, the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak. Finally, the strong should impose their will on the masses, and prospective leaders who ‘know how things are done around here’ should achieve their aims even if this means resorting to violence. Plato knew from his own experience that this would not work. By the time Plato came to write the Gorgias, he had experienced this violence first hand in Athens. The Sparta-inspired coup led by the Thirty Tyrants followed by a counter-coup led by those who wanted to reinstate democracy had NOT made Athens great again. Only education in his view could do that.

E. R. Dodds, who established a Greek text version of the Gorgias plus commentary and who lectured on the text at Oxford during the eventful 1930s, noted its insidious links with Nazism, while the way Callicles used the image of a lion cub to explain the primacy of nature (and the strong) over the law (and the weak) reminded him forcefully of Nietzsche:

We mould the best and the most powerful among us, taking them while they’re still young, like lion cubs, and with charms and incantations we subdue them into slavery, telling them that one is supposed to get no more than his fair share, and that that’s what’s admirable and just. But surely if a man whose nature is equal to it arises, he will shake off, tear apart, and escape all this, he will trample underfoot all our documents, our tricks and charms, and all our laws that violate nature.10

Dodds helpfully gathers references linking Callicles to Nietzsche’s new (!) morality ‘beyond good and evil’. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche speaks admiringly of ‘the magnificent blond beast that prowls in search of booty and victory’,¹¹ an image that seemed to echo Callicles’s view above and also capture the Nazi ideal of a warrior in the 1930s. Furthermore, any attempt to tame the wild beast or reform him would thwart God-given nature. Many rallygoers were hoodwinked by this trope. Here we find ourselves confronted by a ‘new’ morality,¹² a kind of Herrenmoral, a morality of the lordly, against the ‘slave’ morality of the weak.¹³ For all its obscenity, this lordly morality will justify the extermination of Jews as an act of civic responsibility, a ‘hold your nose while you bulldoze away the corpses’ kind of service to the Fatherland. Putting this policy into operation would require the coldness that Hitler recommended.¹⁴ In some kind of twisted irony, a similar policy is currently employed by Israel against Palestinians.

Plato spells out how Callicles then justifies violence:

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 more worthy have a greater share than the less worthy? You are not saying anything else, are you? I do remember correctly?Callicles: Yes, that’s what I was saying then, and I still say so now, too.¹⁵

Having replaced communication with various forms of ‘decorative speech’ as a foil for violence, and having dismissed the puzzlement of philosophy as childish, and having furthermore dismissed the law because it seemed to protect the weak against the strong, the way is clear to justify violence itself. Here we have the Riviera of Gaza or the emptying of the West Bank. Violence could achieve many things, as long as it replaced justice. The problem is that this had not worked in Athens historically and might not work elsewhere either. Even if the worldview of the strong were to become more important than the worldview of care or service, even if those who disagree could be deemed soft-headed or cowardly or, like Socrates, charged with being a dreamer, there is no force to prevent societies from imploding. A new morality based on nature would replace the culture of free speech and promise immediate action, while often leading to the ridiculous irrationalism of blaming the innocent for not being clever enough: holding Ukrainians in contempt for having a smaller army (February 2025), for example, or wiping out Palestinians for not dying off more quickly. Where violence is the only value, a society fractures from within, causing it to turn in on itself in civil strife, because then there is no solution except mutual extermination or the survival of the strongest. Power plays by rules that seem unusual to those whose lives are governed by moral principles or who prefer to live with a sense of justice and fair play – a sense that the law is there not only to protect citizens from the unscrupulous but also to represent society as a collective reality.

From this discussion Plato concludes that leaders who are unwilling to countenance the possibility that they might be wrong are weaker than those who remain open to this possibility. Furthermore, had Plato ever thought of narcissism, he might have concluded that a narcissistic leader would have to be considerably weaker again because of a psychological need to dominate all accounts of the world, all stories told about it, including scientific accounts, so that all interpretations become ‘safe’ and predictable as part of the narcissist’s interior world. There are no facts, just the narcissist’s understanding of events, which can be pure fiction. Ironically, a narcissistic leader can transfer his own faults to the other person, accusing the other person of being rude when he is rude, accusing others of being disrespectful when he is disrespectful, accusing others of being belligerent when he is belligerent. The negative projection outwards on others reflects what others see in the narcissist himself. As a result, narcissists become unreflective, closed in mind and spirit and generally quite stupid in the way they exercise power, even if they have become momentarily more dangerous to others as a result.

Socrates points out in the Gorgias that other factors are required for proper leadership besides speaking, besides representation, besides notoriety, and they can be summed up in the need to have a moral stance that finds its roots in the collective life space of people. All people need to learn constantly, and they need to learn truthful things, whether these are considered ‘facts’ or ‘opinions’. This is why communication is important, as Gorgias himself suggested, and why persuasion is a valid activity, for the truth itself persuades and goodness itself attracts. Encouraged by moral emptiness, the power momentum of being ‘headstrong’ or even a ‘headcase’ carries with it the danger of becoming frozen in one’s worldview and quite ignorant of the world at large.

Violence and lying in the contemporary scene

The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, together with his wife, had his own traumatic encounter with Nazi persecution. His writings often raised the issue of communication. In a radio talk in 1970, he made this remark:

Everywhere one looks one finds that efforts to reach an understanding between zones within a nation, between nations, blocks of nations, and between generations are failing. It would seem that a common language is lacking …¹⁶

Gadamer could have been referring to the world order after the recent Munich summit (February 2025) marked by a lack of common language between J. D. Vance and the EU leaders. Both Plato and Gadamer suggest that for human understanding to operate at all, it requires people to agree on a common willingness to communicate and a common understanding of how language is used and what kind of truth claim it might be possible to make. Vance’s speech was not intended to communicate in this sense. There was no appetite to seek the truth by means of conversation, or in Plato’s terms, to engage dialectically with the audience. Instead, a one-sided harangue revealed quite a store of ignorance and aggression. This same attitude was visible in the famous Zelensky ambush, where once again power was on show and shocking ignorance. If we shut down communication in this way, we end up using the exchange as an occasion for linguistic trickery and the manifestation of power. We are back to the attitude of Polus or Callicles. In a nihilist world, communication has broken down, distrust is fundamental, and a somebody who counts carries on regardless. Gadamer contends that without accepting the integrity of communication, the space will be used to close off any mutual quest for the truth so that no one can ‘weigh and consider fairly what the other person thinks’.¹⁷

This Callicles-like approach enshrines deceit on its altar and surrounds it with lies, fanaticism, propaganda, and rhetorical distractions, ‘decorative speech’, ‘reality television’, or whatever. The search for truth – which once urged the human spirit to learn, to achieve its highest cultural, moral, and political works – has been replaced by a sequence of tatty products that more often than not reflect what the philosopher Alexandre Koyré, with reference to Nazism, called a mendax ab initio, a ‘lie from the start’.¹⁸ Language is turned on its head. Instead of saying something in a communicative, comprehensible, rational, truthful way, announcing a shared world (as Habermas clearly outlined),¹⁹ language becomes a vehicle of confusion and deceit. No communication can be trusted. Words might even mean the opposite of what they appear to mean. Violence is now justified as a form of peace: the elimination of Hamas from Gaza is thought to represent peace with Hamas; the elimination of the Ukraine is thought to establish peace with Russia; the elimination of Palestinians is presented as establishing peace in the region; the breakdown of partnerships is supposed to signal advances in understanding. As if children don’t notice these things …

We can imagine Germany in the twenties, humiliated by their defeat in the First World War, landed in extreme poverty in the wake of the war, subject to the derision of defeat and struggling to survive the rapid inflation that wiped out people’s savings, only to be battered by the worldwide slump made worse by American economic protectionism. Could such Germans be susceptible to a utopian slogan like ‘make Germany great again’ or ‘Deutschland über alles’. Yes, certainly. By a stroke of magic, it could happen. By a stroke of magic and the development of a large army it could happen. Only the people’s will needed to prevail. Only the notion of human resolve counted, as Richard Wolin noted.²⁰ The Nazi party would protect their interests and keep them safe, an idea built into the legal principle non servatur fides infidelibus (trust is not given to outsiders),²¹ by which the Nazis meant that only a few could be trusted to manage the movement. The energy of the crowd assembled at rallies and so forth is then dedicated to the thoughtless service of the movement itself and is subservient to those on the inside track. Koyré notes that this conception of law steers it away from having a role in the protection of the weak and becomes instead an instrument of the powerful, the rich, those with contacts. The scandal of people willing to broadcast huge lies is matched by audiences willing to believe them or at least to admit them as entertainment. A general lack of truth, however, weakens all ‘truth-claims’. Swallowing whoppers leads inevitably to self-delusion:

because leaders can easily snigger at the gullibility of insiders too. Since the mob believes everything it is told, even if it seems preposterous in the cool light of day, it is content as long as its passions and fears are acknowledged and supported.²²

We already know that democracies by declaring ‘martial law’ create a ‘state of exception’ outside the protection of the law. Without any third-value field (such as a sense of justice or a mutual quest for the truth), the choice reduces to the one between the rule of law and the rule of nature, and if the law is suspended, nature prevails. Now ‘extraordinary powers’ are in play. Constitutional backstops are abandoned, the real power agenda of leaders comes into view as a suspension of the law itself, and a new conception of the world order confirms the age of loyalty to no one except whoever must be obeyed.

Following up on the US senate’s Patriot Act of 26 October 2001, George W. Bush’s decree of 13 November 2001 declared that, in view of the imminent danger to the security of the US (!), the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without trial would be permitted without due process or the protection of the Geneva Convention.²³ The result was Guantanamo Bay and the torture cells of Abu Ghraib. Such a turn signals a ‘state of war’ response to acts of ‘terrorism’ no different from the suspension of human rights of Jews by the Nazis or the widespread roundup of Palestinians without charge by Israel in the West Bank. It is what Giorgio Agamben called the ‘state of exception’, meaning the ‘suspension of the juridical order itself’.²⁴ It is no surprise that Hitler’s decree of 28 February 1933, designed ‘for the protection of the people and the state’, suspended the Weimar constitution and set Germany under martial law until the end of the war, enabling the Jewish population to be cast as outsiders and giving a full range of powers to the thought police. Violence could then be unleashed without any limits, since Jews were immediately judged to be outsiders without any rights.

These examples might sober us up to the fact that the possibility of a ‘state of exception’ is embedded in all forms of civil government, including democracy. It is primed to erupt spontaneously once a state thinks itself to be under imminent threat. It prompts societies to unleash nihilist mechanisms.

In the light of this revelation, we cannot afford to become too starry- eyed about our democracies. At present, the question must be asked whether Trumpism can lead the US into a form of oppression where Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ becomes the norm. One need only be reminded of the current detention without charge or trial of Mahmoud Khalil (March 2025), a naturalised American citizen, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for organising pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, where he recently finished a Masters Degree. And there have been other examples where the exercise of free speech has been associated with ‘terrorism’. The principle of the ‘state of exception’ comes into play when a group or person is defined as standing outside the law. Nowadays, the word ‘terrorist’ is often used to describe them. According to the totalitarian mindset, all opponents are considered ‘exceptions’ and dangerous threats to the state so that, in extreme circumstances, persistent opposition must be removed. What happened in Athens in 404 BCE, now happens today.

We remember some of Putin’s opponents: Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian prison in 2024 at the age of forty-seven; Boris Nemtsov, aged fifty-

five, shot on a bridge in Moscow; various others who fell out of windows (Ravil Maganov, Valentina Bondarenko); and the infamous Yevgeny Progozhin, mercenary leader and not exactly a refreshing dinner guest, whose plane mysteriously dropped out of the sky in August 2023. Hannah Arendt offers this shrewd insight:

Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler proceeds like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defence. This certainly is a little crude, but it works … ²⁵

It certainly applies to Putin’s animosity towards Zelensky. Not only a danger to be excluded but a threat to be eliminated. Rather ironically, Arendt explains that totalitarian leaders need opponents to bolster their own authority and to show that they are the only ones who can rescue the state from the political turmoil represented by opponents (‘Slow Joe’, ‘Zelensky opposes the robbery of his country’s mineral resources’, etc.) In addition, such leaders can often claim to stand at the crossroads of history, an indispensable cog in an inevitable process, a humble servant of a relentless historical movement (and yet worthy of proper adulation, etc.) Hitler claimed that his movement would last a thousand years, while Nazi supporters enjoyed a Hegelian rush when they imagined that their movement, the equivalent of MAGA, would be central to the ultimate destiny of the world. Most people, as Arendt might say, prefer to be robots rather than martyrs,²⁶ automatons rather than thinkers. Once lobotomies remove their critical faculties, all bets are off.

Plato’s account has revealed something more fundamental about human beings than the human lust for power. While Trump rallies or Nazi rallies objectively display an appetite for power, they also woo attendees to believe that there is no truth other than the lies told by the leader (or the suitable news outlet). Reaching for the truth seems superfluous to the group for many reasons, as it did for Callicles – basically because everything else is ‘fake news’ or ‘propaganda’, or the ‘ridiculous and unmanly’ musings of philosophers. These manifestations of the mendax ab initio deny human inquiry or debate any place in the political landscape. What remains is violence of tyrants.

Conclusion

We seem to have wandered far away from Callicles but perhaps not all that far. It is a clear assumption of the Gorgias that the very tendency to be a somebody in society was linked in Athenian culture to the skills of decorative

speech, which, in the cases of Polus and Callicles, also meant the prioritisation of power over justice. For thousands of years, this kind of political priority has doled out misery to millions of people.

Callicles still holds to the view that ‘might is right’, but it is difficult to see how this view can be sustained without an unlimited number of upstarts trying to claim that their ideas are the ones that count over others. The world is full of ‘somebodies’ and ‘influencers’, but peaceful living requires peacemakers and those who fight for justice. Plato’s text ultimately ends in a stalemate between Socrates arguing for open-mindedness as a model for statesmanship²⁷ and Callicles arguing for rule by the strongest. Socrates in the end resorts to the myth of the divine Assize,²⁸ whereby all justice and injustice will be decided upon when the soul moves from this life to the next. Everyone will then see the option for violence etched on the bodies of the wicked rather than the glow of justice on the faces of the just. The following text from the very end of the Gorgias sums up Plato’s pessimism on this point:

For it’s a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be in at present, when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important one at that, to sound off as though we’re somebodies. That’s how far behind in education we’ve fallen.²⁹

Plato certainly valued learning as a form of life and considered education to be the main factor that would make Athens great again. His rejection of politics, as he saw it being practised, was one way of dealing with the abuses of power. It would be some centuries before Roman stoicism came to understand natura not as an interior power already given at birth to certain individuals, as Callicles and Nietzsche believed, but as an ordered environment, a kosmos, in relation to which a wise person chooses to live. This view would be too conservative for Callicles or Nietzsche. It arguably led to the view that Roman law was no opponent of natura but rather its attempted expression. Every individual, who is a small individual in a large empire, could judge his personal progress in leadership by how he came to understand what things he could change and what things he could not change. Belief in stoic natura led to the idea of service, however ill-judged or rudimentary. Should the basis of this service be empire (Macedonian or Roman), one’s own empire (commercial or political), or the world’s climate, or whether some real transcendent being could be thought to unify all peoples, that is the question.

We might leave the final word to Plato who, reflecting on the decision of Dionysius II of Syracuse not to opt for democracy but to revert to tyranny, took a darker view of the way human beings handle power:

At last I came to the conclusion that all existing states are badly governed and the condition of their laws practically incurable, without some miraculous remedy and the assistance of fortune; and I was forced to say, in praise of true philosophy, that from her height alone was it possible to discern what the nature of justice is, either in the state or in the individual, and that the ills of the human race would never end until either those who are sincerely and truly lovers of wisdom come into political power, or the rulers of our cities, by the grace of God, learn true philosophy.³⁰

On the other hand, perhaps something further needs to be said, something about the form of education we offer the young who can be so easily led to follow the trappings of power and notoriety. Perhaps there is, as Plato himself believed, an educational way that avoids the self-imposed isolation of hatred and violence towards others, an educational way that promotes service and a sense of responsibility for people and the planet where all humans live but only some humans flourish, an educational way that avoids the self-centeredness and méféinery concealed behind images of success presented to the many young Callicles of our time. What could such a form of education be?

If we were to accept Simone Weil’s advice, such an education would require a genuinely spiritual orientation. From her perspective, a non- practising Jew, a not yet converted Christian, a young French intellectual about to die of heartbreak in the middle of WWII, this education would have to include the introduction of children to a genuine spiritual life. As she explains:

Totalitarianism’s idolatrous course can only be arrested by coming up against a genuinely spiritual way of life. If children are brought up not to think about God, they will become Fascist or Communist for want of something to which to give themselves.³¹

Dr Fiachra Long is retired Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University College Cork. His most recent book is Essays in the Phenomenology of Learning: The Challenge of Proximity (London & New York: Routledge, 2023).

Notes

1. Plato, Gorgias, ed by E. R. Dodds (Oxford University Press, 2002), 462c.
2. Plato, Gorgias, 463a.
3. Phaedrusin John M. Cooper, Plato: Complete Works, trans. by Nehamas and Woodruff (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1997), 267d.
4. Plato, Gorgias, 481c–d.
5. Plato, Gorgias, 462a.
6. Plato, Gorgias, 484d.
7. Eric Voegelin, ‘The Philosophy of Existence: Plato’s Gorgias’, The Review of Politics, 11:4 (1949), pp. 477–498 (p. 487).
8. Plato, Gorgias, 485c.
9. Richard Johnson-Sheehan, ‘Who Was Callicles? Exploring Four Relationships between Rhetoric and Justice in Plato’s Gorgias’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 35:3 (2021), pp. 263–288 (p. 269). Repeats W. K. C. Guthrie’s remark that the Greeks in general were fond of contrasting nomos (law) and phusis (nature), whether slaves/ goods were such by nature or by custom, etc.
10. Plato, Gorgias, 483e–484a.
11. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I, ii.
12. ‘To call the taming of an animal its “improvement” is in our ears almost a joke’, Nietzsche, Twilightof Idols (Hollingdale trans.), 7.2.
13. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 260.
14. See appendix to Plato, Gorgias, p. 390.
15. Plato, Gorgias, 488b.
16. Hans Georg Gadamer, ‘Language and Understanding’, in The Gadamer Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 92.
17. Gadamer, ‘Language and Understanding, p. 117, italics in original.
18. Alexandre Koyré, ‘The Political Function of the Modern Lie’, October, 160 (2017), pp. 143–151 (p. 143).
19. Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (London: Heinemann, 1979).
20. Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children(Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 132.
21. Koyré, ‘The Political Function of the Modern Lie’, p. 149.
22. Koyré, ‘The Political Function of the Modern Lie’, p. 151.
23. Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World? (Penguin Random House, 2017).
24. Giorgio Agamben, Stateof Exception(University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 4.
25. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism(San Diego/New York/ London: HBJ, 1979), p. 424.
26. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 363.
27. Plato, Gorgias, 521d.
28. Dodds commentary on 526d–527e, in Plato, Gorgias, p. 384.
29. My thanks to a colleague who further elucidated the Greek term neanieuomai,given via Liddel and Scott Greek-English lexicon as: ‘to be a youth; to act like a youth; to behave wilfully or impetuously, to make youthful boasts’. Zeyl’s translation, taken up by Cooper in Complete Works of Plato,prefers the expression: ‘being a somebody’, Gorgias, 527e.
30. Plato, Letter VII, 326a.
31. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 87.