The Impractical Philosopher

10 February 2025

The Impractical Philosopher

“Callicles:  This is the truth of the matter, as you [Socrates] will acknowledge if you abandon philosophy and move on to more important things.  Philosophy is no doubt a delightful thing, Socrates, as long as one is exposed to it in moderation at the appropriate time of life [as a young man].  But if one spends more time with it than he should, it’s a man’s undoing.  For even if one is naturally well favored but engages in philosophy far beyond that appropriate time of life, he can’t help but turn out to be inexperienced in everything a man who’s to be admirable and good and well thought of is supposed to be experienced in.  Such people turn out to be inexperienced in the laws of their city or in the kind of speech one must use to deal with people on matters of business, whether in public or private, inexperienced also in human pleasures and appetites and, in short, inexperienced in the ways of human beings altogether.  So, when they venture into some private or political activity, they become a laughingstock, as I suppose men in politics do when they venture into your pursuits and your kind of speech.”

(Plato, Gorgias, translated by Donald J. Zeyl, Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1997, pages 828-829, 484c-e, ISBN: 9780872203495)

1.  This attack on Philosophy, and Socrates, is embedded in a discussion about if it is better to suffer an injustice or to commit an injustice, a view that is brought up in a number of dialogues.  

This discussion about injustice itself grows out of a discussion about the nature of ‘oratory’, which is the art that Gorgias teaches.  The structure of Gorgias is complex and at times it is difficult to keep in mind the various topics that have been raised.  But it is well worth reading, and rereading, Gorgias to get a sense of the intermingling, or interweaving, of the various topics that are raised.

2.  Callicles seems to be a practical man.  Because of this Callicles thinks that philosophy has some value, but we shouldn’t overdo it.  I suspect that Callicles is thinking that philosophy gives young men the tools they need to have to make a good argument, to detect logical fallacies that someone might use in their arguments, and in general to sharpen a young man’s intelligence.  In other words, Callicles is looking at philosophy as a set of tools that serve specific, worldly, purposes.  Callicles might feel the same way about learning how to draw; it’s good to be able to sketch something because it might make what you are talking about clearer to others; but if a young man spends too much time on drawing this will lead to practical matters not receiving the attention Callicles thinks they deserve.

3.  Callicles is an example of someone who thinks the material world is the only reality and for this reason all human activity should be judged from the perspective of the material world.  I’m not saying that Callicles would self-identify as a materialist; I think it is likely that Callicles participates in the civic religion of Athens.  But I am saying that the idea of the transcendental, and the idea that human beings should align themselves to the transcendental, including their behavior in daily life, is not something that Callicles would take seriously.

4.  Callicles lists the deficiencies a life in philosophy will lead to.  It’s worthwhile to go over them one by one:

4.1  Philosophers will be inexperienced in the laws of their city.  That’s interesting; there is an awful lot of political philosophy these days; think of Rawls, Nozick, and an earlier generation that includes Carl Schmidt, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Strauss.  These are philosophers who are well regarded, if not always agreed with.  Does this mean that Callicles is wrong?  I don’t think so.  Rather I think this indicates how much the idea of philosophy has changed in modernity.

For Plato, and for Callicles as well, philosophy is a transcendental project and a way of life grounded in the ascetic ideal.  The ascetic ideal turns away, to the degree possible, from worldly affairs.  This is why Callicles can justifiably complain that someone who dedicates their life to philosophy will not know the laws of their city; because the life of a philosopher is focused on that which transcends such concerns.

This may seem unlikely to many modern readers who have the tendency of reading dialogues such as The Republic and Laws as political works instead of allegories offering guidance to the philosophical practitioner who is walking the way to the transcendental.  It takes a shift in one’s consciousness to read these works so that their ‘undermeaning’ shines through.

4.2  Philosophers will be inexperienced in the speech that is used in matters of business.  The focus of business is on buying and selling and generating a profit through those exchanges.  In this context it is helpful to note that Socrates did not charge money for his teachings and contrasted this with the Sophists who charged for their services (sometimes charging significant fees).  The speech of the philosopher is focused on the path to the transcendent; philosophical speech is concerned with purification and renunciation and with clarifying the nature of the timeless and transcendent.  This is a different focus, using a different vocabulary, and a different methodology; that methodology being dialectic.  Philosophical speech is about offering caring guidance on how to live a virtuous life which is foundational for the philosophical life.  In contrast, matters of business are focused on materially gaining an advantage over others.

4.3  Philosophers will be inexperienced in human pleasures and appetites.  Here I would say that Callicles is not speaking accurately.  Philosophers may be experienced in pleasures and appetites, but that experience doesn’t lead to a life focused on pleasures and appetites.  The biography of a philosopher can be one of discovering the hollowness of bodily pleasures and the diminishment that appetites bring to both body and soul.  This then leads to a turning away from pleasures and appetites and the discovery of that which transcends such ephemera.

It may be that some philosophers have no actual experience with human pleasures and appetites; that is because of their own fortunate karma.  I mean that a philosopher who has the good fortune of never having engaged in these pleasures and appetites is likely to have worked on putting them aside in previous lives, thereby having a foundation for ascetic practice already present in their consciousness or soul.

But whether a philosopher has learned of the great harms that accrue due to pleasures and appetites in this life, or in past lives, in the current life they live a life that is not based on the pursuit of them.  This is why philosophers in the Classical period lived lives that were observably different from that of most people, as Callicles observes.

4.4  Philosophers will be inexperienced in the way of human beings altogether.  This may be hyperbole on the part of Callicles, but I think he is making a valid point.  In a way the practitioner of philosophy is not a human being; what I mean by that is that the philosopher divests himself of many things that almost all human beings are concerned with and consider important.  Callicles finds this disquieting, or maybe disgusting.  

And there are examples of philosophers who, because of their inexperience in ordinary human affairs, find themselves in very dangerous circumstances; I am thinking of Boethius as a good example of this.  But the philosopher, once he has the experience of the Good, the Beautiful, and the One, knows that everything else is inconsequential by comparison.  For those who have not had this experience of the Presence of Eternity, that does not make sense.  For this reason there is a chasm between Socrates and Callicles that is almost impossible to bridge.