 Callicles himself does not seem to realize how deep the problems with his position go. He responds to Socrates’ refutations by making a rather shrug-like suggestion that (contrary to his earlier explicit insistence) some pleasures are of course better than others (499b). In the end, Callicles’ position is perhaps best seen as a series of shifting suggestions or impulses—against conventional justice, against temperance, for the Homeric self-assertion of the strong, for pleasures and psychological intensity—rather than a coherent set of philosophical theses. The disunified quality of Callicles’ thought may actually be the key to its perpetual power: almost all readers find something to tempt them here, and are easily left with the lurking sense that the ‘real’ Calliclean position, whatever we might prefer it to be, remains unrefuted. (And indeed of the four ingredients of Callicles’ position discussed above, Socrates’ arguments target only (3) and (4): whether (1) and (2) could be reconceived on some lines not reliant on them is an open question.) This unease is strengthened by a fifth component of Callicles’ position: his attack on the value of philosophy itself. It is a prominent theme of Callicles’ opening rants that philosophy, while a valuable part of liberal education, is unworthy and a waste of time for a serious adult (485e–486d). The life of philosophy is unmanly and immature, the antithesis of an honorable public life; Socrates ought to ‘stop this refuting’ and ‘leave these subtleties to others’. Callicles’ anti-intellectualism does not prevent him from showing some skill in dialectic, and more commitment to its norms than most of Socrates’ interlocutors (e.g., at 495a). But Callicles also claims that he argues only to please Gorgias (506c); and in the end, he opts out of the discussion altogether, retreating into surly silence. What makes this rejection of philosophical dialectic disturbing is Callicles’ suggestion that Socrates’ philosophical positions are just self-serving expressions of his commitment to his own way of life—a version of the plausible ancient Greek truism that each man naturally praises his own way of life as best. According to Callicles, this means that Socrates would have to change his practices to gain insight: “This is the truth of the matter, as you will know if you abandon philosophy and move on to more important things” (484c). Callicles is here the first voice within philosophy to raise the prospect that there are truths which philosophy itself may hide from us. That is a possibility which Socrates clearly rejects; but it is hard to see how he could refute it.