Page 92 [92]
OCR
expectations of a given community. That is, the base is quantity, not quality. The will of the masses, according to the Sophists, will be the basis of regulations, and after this point in history this always has the most bearing and, more importantly, is the point of reference. As Callicles says: The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbours; for knowing their own inferiority, I suspect that they are too glad of equality. And therefore the endeavour to have more than the many, is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice (compare Republic), whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. (Plato 2013. 483.c-d.) Interestingly, the ideal norm here is confronted with empirical reality, according to which it might even be right. (Although—excuse me for the humor—Callicles did not read Kant.) So, according to the Sophists, laws were created by weak people, by the masses, which the class we call philosophers hates more than anything else. For Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, the masses are not only content to live all at the same level (as long as that level is as low as possible), but actually feel good about it, because their community expects nothing from them but compliance. They do not have to toil; they do not have to strive for more. From their perspective, which is neither broad nor deep, the whole world looks the same. This “mole perspective,” which Plato called the cave life, is com
