Callicles and Dr. Frost
How a Contemporary View That Seems to Arise From Modern Science First Appeared in Antiquity
(This post continues a comparison between C.S. Lewis, as explained by N.S. Lyons, and Plato, which I began in my last post . Both are part of a series which tries to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture of which these posts form a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)
Readers of my last post will recall that it centred on a particular form of evil, one that begins in a concern to get ahold of what is really real. The first step in this direction was named “debunking” by C.S. Lewis, and had a predecessor in the fifth century BC in the theme of custom and nature (nomos and phusis) as treated by both Plato and Thucydides. Our guide to the thought of Lewis, one N.S. Lyons, summarised this debunking as “the belief… that any moral feelings or pangs of conscience are merely subjective experiences and what would today be called ‘social constructs,’ while the real world is purely material, and therefore purely materialistic. To be ‘purely objective’ is therefore, in this view, to focus only on the material, and dismiss the rest as non-existent.” I found an analogue to “social constructs” in ancient Athens in the word nomos, or custom, which is compared unfavourably with what is taken to be really real: phusis, or nature.
What I want to do here is to look a bit more closely at one connection between Lewis and Plato, both because I find it interesting in its own right, and also because I think it sheds some light on our own time. It concerns the division between what is taken to be really real and what is not, between the material world and mere “social constructs,” between what Plato and Thucydides knew as nature (physis) and custom (nomos). What struck me after working through Lyons’ essay was not simply that this division is present in antiquity, but in particular that it is present within Callicles, a character in Plato’s Gorgias, who has been written so as to contain both sides. The difference between Callicles and Dr. Frost, a character in Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength, seems to me to provide another window on what is peculiar to our own time, and what is not.
The division in question should be familiar enough to people today, but because it is my central focus here I will risk labouring the point and give a brief sketch of it before going any further. The idea is that the material world is the only true reality, and modern science is the main (or sole) source of genuine thought and understanding. Quite apart from this reality is the world of our norms, which tells us what we ought and ought not to do, a world that includes all judgments of what is good or evil, or beautiful or ugly, and all love. All of this second world is taken to be merely second-order, derivative phenomena, to be explained in terms of such things as chemical reactions in our brains.
The problem with this view is that it has us live in two quite separate worlds at once, and human life requires that we attend to both. The first is taken to give us the truth; in the other world, from which we get the notion of good and bad, we have the only basis from which we might act. But if we were to focus only on the “truth” as it is understood here, there would be no reason to do anything, nor could the truth be a good thing (and that would bring up the question of why we should bother focusing on it). On the other hand, if we were to retreat entirely into what we take to be good and right, we would seem to abandon the truth completely.
If we ask what moves people today into accepting this view of two separate worlds – I will refer to it below as “the double world hypothesis” – in which only the material side counts as true, the answer seems obvious enough: science. The modern scientific account can seem to be so completely adequate on its own, and has given such a convincing account of things in strictly material terms, that it seems a straightforward matter to see the truth in the material realm only.
With this in mind, let us turn to Lewis’ character Dr. Frost. A few words from Frost himself should suffice to give an idea of his view of things: “resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical phenomena. Social relations are chemical phenomena. You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner … subjective feelings of mutual confidence and liking… are chemical phenomena. They could all in principle be produced by injections.” Such views are, in themselves, not really remarkable these days. What makes Frost interesting is the fact that he takes it to be important to focus, all the time and as consistently as possible, on what he takes to be the truth of things. Feeling nervous about talking in front of a great crowd of people? Remember, it’s just chemical phenomena. Do you trust your colleagues or love your spouse? Don’t let such things influence you in any way, as they’re just chemical phenomena. If you find yourself moved by pity to go easy on someone in a weak position – well, do you really want to be moved by mere chemical phenomena? Dr. Frost, then, represents an attempt to resolve the difficulty of the relation between the two worlds I described above by affirming one to the complete exclusion of the other. He might seem to represent a working-out of the scientific worldview to its logical conclusion.
I think a look at the ancient world complicates this picture, because we find close parallels there to the view of things that produces Dr. Frost. So let us turn to Callicles.
When Callicles enters the argument of the Gorgias, he launches into a long speech in which he sets out his views (482c-486d), but immediately before he does so, Socrates addresses him with words that direct our attention to a particular concern: “... Callicles himself will not agree with you, Callicles, but he will be discordant with you in the whole of your life. And yet I think, my excellent friend, that it is superior to have my lyre out of tune and discordant, and any chorus I might equip, and for most men to disagree with me and contradict me, than for me – just one man – to be discordant with myself and contradict myself.” (482b-c, trans. Irwin) The concern here is consistency. That is, immediately before he has Callicles speak, Plato focuses the reader’s attention on the question of whether Callicles will contradict himself.
If we keep this in mind as we consider what Callicles proceeds to say in his lengthy speech, we find that he does in fact contradict himself. In that speech he sets out the distinction between convention and nature (i.e., nomos and phusis, which we encountered in our treatment of Lyons and Lewis), and it becomes apparent that he believes he can occupy a position of great argumentative strength by basing his claims upon nature rather than mere convention.
One portion of his long speech carries the pretence that it is simply an account of the way things are. He begins this part by saying “nature shows,” and ends it with the words “that’s how that truth is” (483d-484c). That is, he is simply being realistic, giving a straightforward account of the facts, and his manner of speaking is simply indicative – we do not hear about how things ought to be. On the contrary, he speaks in a derogatory fashion first of “spells and incantations”, and then of “writings, charms, incantations, all the rules [nomoi] contrary to nature [para phusin]:” he is pointing here to what he sees as the deficiency in the world of convention. With this in mind, consider the view of justice that he sets forth in this context: “it is just for the better man to have more than the worse, and the more powerful than the less powerful. Nature shows that this is so in many areas – among other animals, and in whole cities and races of men, that the just stands decided in this way – the superior rules over the weaker and has more. For what sort of justice did Xerxes rely on when he marched against Greece, or his father against the Scythians?... I think these men do these things according to nature” (483d). This account differs from charms and incantations by virtue of its claim to be based in nature: this is simply what the facts of the world show, at least if we free ourselves from the filter of how we might like them to be. We have in this portion of Callicles’ lengthy speech the world according to nature, not convention.
Immediately after, this, however (484c-485e), we suddenly find ourselves awash in conventional language telling us how the world ought to be. For example, Callicles tells us that “philosophy is a delightful thing, if someone touches it in moderation at the right time of life; but if he persists in it longer than he should [emphasis mine], it’s the ruin of men.” He goes on to talk of how one must have experience of the right things if one want to be gentleman of good reputation – and in particular, he thinks it important to have experience of the customs or laws (nomoi) of the city. Soon he is holding forth on how people talk: he sees it to be fitting [emphasis mine] for a child to mumble, but if an adult mumbles in a similar manner, it is something fit for a slave, ridiculous and unmanly for a free citizen. Thus he speaks here in quite a different manner than a moment before, focusing on how things ought to be, on what is fitting, and even points to the importance of experience of one’s local customs. This sort of thing quite plainly gives us the world according to convention.
So Callicles gives us two very different views, one right after the other, and they point in two very different directions. One is based in nature and is harshly critical of a foundation in convention, while the other adopts a straightforwardly conventional standpoint. All this comes right after Callicles has himself set out the distinction between nature and convention. He never explains the relationship between these two sides, nor does he even acknowledge what he has done here. It seems that Socrates’ initial warning about self-contradiction was well given. (I give a somewhat more detailed overview of these two sides in the book, pp. 138-141.)
We have, then, two sides to Callicles, one based in nature, one in convention.* In fact they are two quite separate worlds. It is above all in this two-sided portrayal of Callicles that Plato anticipates the contemporary problem I set out above, what I called the double world hypothesis. What Callicles knows as the side of nature lines up with the material side of the division today, which is taken to be really real; the conventions that Callicles derides as spells and incantations are equivalent to what are dismissively referred to as “social constructs” today. Just as Callicles is committed to both worlds, so are all people (aside from the odd Dr. Frost today) – and yet we do seem to be dealing with two quite separate worlds here, that exclude one another in their basic natures. Plato has done something significant by putting the two worlds together within a single character: he has pointed to the need somehow to know both sides as parts of a single whole.
What should seem remarkable to us today is that we see the same shape of things in antiquity, millennia before the advent of modern science. This suggests that simply saying ‘science’ is not be the right way to explain how one ends up with a double world hypothesis of the sort I set out above. I would rather explain that in terms of the historical situation: the normative side of things, the side of custom and moral intuitions – it all gradually comes to seem less real as an ethical order comes apart. That, I think, is likely to play the major role in bringing about this view of a double world: not so much the success of modern science in giving a material explanation as the collapse of the older order through which norms were seen to be real (I gave an overview of this collapse in my first post). After all, there is nothing in modern science per se that requires us to see norms as mere “social constructs,” as something that is not really real.
That is not to deny that science today plays a decisive role in determining the form these ideas can take today. Let us return to C.S. Lewis and Dr. Frost. The character of Dr. Frost is supposed to show us one endpoint to which the double world hypothesis leads today, when worked out to its logical conclusion. Lewis explains: “for many years he had theoretically believed that all which appears in the mind as motive or intention is merely a by-product of what the body is doing. But for the last year or so – since he had been initiated – he had begun to taste as fact what he had long held as theory. Increasingly, his actions had been without motive. He did this and that, he said thus and thus, and did not know why. His mind was a mere spectator. He could not understand why that spectator should exist at all. He resented its existence, even while assuring himself that resentment also was merely a chemical phenomenon. The nearest thing to a human passion which still existed in him was a sort of cold fury against all who believed in the mind. There was no tolerating such an illusion! There were not, and must not be, such things as men.”
As I suggested in my last post, I don’t think there is any equivalent in antiquity for this cold fury. The whole passage here, and indeed the character of Dr. Frost in general, represents something we do not find in Plato or Thucydides: the resolution of the double world in favour of one world, that is, the world of nature or matter, to the exclusion of norms or values. So while Callicles has two sides, Dr. Frost has (or is trying to have) only one. In the difference between the two, I think we have an important difference between antiquity and modernity.
There is another, related difference. If we look to the examples from antiquity that I brought out in my last piece, we find that those who bring forth the doctrine that the strong should rule the weak do so at a moment when they believe themselves strong. The Athenians do so at Melos, not when vanquished at Sicily; Callicles clearly does not believe himself to be among the lesser sort of men. In similar fashion, Diodotus, when he engages in something like the “debunking” that Lewis identified, does so in order to save the people of Mytilene. That is, when we see people engaging in “debunking” in antiquity, there is more than a hint of instrumentality about it: they are not simply pursuing what they think is true, but are concerned with practical matters. The move is in each case made in pursuit of some end.
The case of Dr. Frost, and those who are inclined to move in his direction today, seems to me to run on different tracks. Because modern science has done so much to explain the world in strictly material terms, the view that there is nothing but matter is a much more natural one than it once was. Dr. Frost and many others will resolve the problem of the double world as they do because they are moved by a regard for the truth above all else. This, I take it, is where the “cold fury” mentioned by Lewis comes from: great sacrifices have been made to pursue the truth as Dr. Frost understands it, all else has been cast aside, and it is an affront to all this and to the most fundamental motive principle, the “truth,” that there might be “such things as men.”
Thus the modern world does not invent the distinction between natural and the normative for the first time, as that appeared many centuries ago. What is new is the way in which it is sometimes present to us: I think many people today can be more easily moved to accept the double world hypothesis because of a zeal for the truth than because of practical matters, and they consequently find it easier to enter territory that nobody in Plato or Thucydides quite reached (even if they flirted with it). That is, people today might be feel a compulsion towards the vision of Dr. Frost because modern science can make it seem true as nothing in antiquity could.
It is important to recognise that the older, more pragmatic way in which people might come to accept the double world hypothesis is also still with us. We saw, last time, that Diodotus was striving for something good as he “debunked” the norms of his own time: he was trying to save the lives of the people of Mytilene. In similar fashion, many today engage in similar practices, tearing down longstanding norms in the hope of attaining something good. The good in question is often a liberation from something that seems oppressive and confining – I gave the example of marriage in my first post. But of course the same problem that was present with Diodotus, that a short-term success might lay the ground for deeper difficulties in the longer term, might also be present today, and once the last norm has been deconstructed, is there anything better than Dr. Frost waiting?
With that thought, I conclude my look at C.S. Lewis, as seen through N.S. Lyons, and Plato. It has, I hope, given a further instance of something suggested at the start of the earlier piece, that the study of antiquity allows us to see our own time more clearly, because it helps us grasp what is peculiar to it.
* Dr. Wolff, in the 1999 Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, was the first to set out this view of Callicles as a two-sided character, so far as I know.