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Nietzsche's theory has many similarities with Callicles thought in Plato's Gorgias (Nietzsche and Callicles on Happiness, Pleasure, and Power). However, he did not explicitely mention Callicles in his writings. Did he acknowledge anywhere having read Gorgias dialogue?

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    You have to search on N's work (available in electronic format). Having said that, N was a professor of philosophy: thus, we may presume a good first-hand knowledge of ancient Greek classics. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Feb 10 '23 at 12:05
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    Plato was prifessir of philology, not philosophy, a discipline strongly associated with Germany that fell of favour as term after WW2, it focused on classics. It can be taken as a given he'd read all of Plato. Did you read this answer? 'Is Plato's Callicles an example of Nietzsche's Übermensch? Is the Epicurean hedonist?' https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/38853/is-platos-callicles-an-example-of-nietzsches-%C3%9Cbermensch-is-the-epicurean-hedo Nietzsche's works are all in the public domain, and available in searchable form here https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/779 – CriglCragl Feb 10 '23 at 12:21
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    What Nietzsche read has been a topic of interest & dispute for scholars fir quite some timevhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche This document lists what he can be confirmed to have been reading, & what he was lecturing on, year by year http://www.nietzschecircle.com/Pdf/NIETZSCHE_S_LIBRARY.pdf - you can see he lectured extensively on Plato. The book was well known. So he simply must have read it. – CriglCragl Feb 10 '23 at 12:37
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    See [Nietzsche and Callicles](http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_8/urstad_december2010.pdf). – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Feb 10 '23 at 13:34
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    I think Nietzsche was a professor of philology, not philosophy. – Frank Feb 10 '23 at 14:50
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    But in Nietzsche, if I remember correctly, slave morality comes as a consequence of master morality, not ex nihilo. I don't know if Callicles has that mechanism. In Nietzsche, there is a logic that leads to slaves resenting the masters and developing slave morality. Don't know if it's the same in Callicles. – Frank Feb 10 '23 at 14:56
  • @Frank there is also a similar logic: "I plainly assert, that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them [...] And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. To this however the many cannot attain; and they **blame the strong man because they are ashamed of their own weakness**, which they desire to conceal, and hence [...] they enslave the nobler natures, and being unable to satisfy their pleasures, they praise temperance and justice out of their own cowardice. " –  Feb 10 '23 at 15:08
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    @CriglCragl I think you got a typo when you say that _Plato_ was a professor of philology :-) You probably meant _Nietzsche_. There probably would not have been much philology to be done in Plato's time :-) – Frank Feb 10 '23 at 15:55
  • @irecorsan Is that from Callicles? Indeed, looks quite similar to Nietzsche! – Frank Feb 10 '23 at 15:56
  • Interesting to see two philosophers separated by thousands of years see eye to eye on such important matters as happiness, pain, pleasure, etc. – Agent Smith Feb 16 '23 at 17:01

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I don’t know of a definitive reference. The book on the presocratic Greek philosophers may possibly have a reference to Callicles but I don’t believe so. Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (on II.9) has some interesting remarks on their resemblance however, noting that Callicles is indeed a clear precursor to Nietzsche, and that Nietzsche may be understood as having “completed” Callicles.

Joseph Weissman
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I managed to find an explicit citation to Gorgias dialogue in his Homer's contest (it is written Georgias which is why it was not showing up), which shows he read it or at least was fully familiar with its content:

What, for example, in Plato is of special artistic significance in his dialogues is mainly the result of a rivalry with the art of orators, sophists, and dramatists of his time, invented for the purpose of enabling him to say at last: "Look, I too can do what my great rivals can; indeed, I can do it better than they. No Protagoras has written myths so beautiful as I, no dramatists created such an animated and fascinating whole as the Symposium, no orator composed such a speech as I put down in Gorgias - and now I reject it altogether and condemn all imitative art! Only the contest made me into a poet, into a sophist, into a orator!"

As a bonus, I emailed the Friedrich Nietzsche Society and they told me that most scholars who couple Nietzsche with Callicles are his detractors, because if one has a deeper understanding of his power ontology then most similarities are spurious and based on the well-known caricature of his thoughts. Interesting.

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    This doesn't refer to Callicles in any specific way, does it? – Chris Degnen Feb 16 '23 at 07:19
  • @chris-degnen No it doesn't, but it at least shows he was familiar with the whole content of Gorgias dialogue, since in particular the final response from Socrates to Callicles is in the form of a long discourse (hence the irony I think he is mentioning that Plato wrote a great piece of oratory). –  Feb 16 '23 at 07:27
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Nietzsche was a philosopher as well as being well read in works of Ancient Greece. His first work after all was The Birth of Tragedy, a work of literary analysis on the form of tragedy in Ancient Greece.

He is also well known to see himself as sui generis and rarely refers to the work of other thinkers that influenced his thought. For example Darwin's notion of natural selection. Nor does he mention the Persian lyricism that informs his work, Thus Spoke Zarathrustha. So it is not surprising he doesn't mention Plato's work, Gorgias, specially considering his antipathy to Plato and Socrates.

The first professional philosopher to mention the parallels between the arguments of Callicles with those of Nietzsche is Adolph Menzel. In particular, Callicles argument that justice is born out of impotence and resentment antipates Nietzsche's notion of ressentiment.

This is mentioned in an essay by Bernardo Ferro on these parallels. In there he characterises the Nietzschean 'Will to Power' as a 'basic or primordorial' sense, which does not have an end, but is it's own end. This is reminiscent of Schopenhauer's notion of the Will behind all things. He also describes it as a 'physiological drive for self-enjoyment amd self-enhancement'. This 'physiology' separates it from Schopenhauer's account which is metaphysical and brings it into the biological and material world. But there it becomes self-refuting, for as the Buddha observed, people are born in weakness - they are born and end in weakness - they get old and frail!

Mozibur Ullah
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