![must respect a willingness to die in the quest to prepare the world something (or someone) new
and greater. ‘The dying Socrates, the man elevated above fear of death through knowledge and
reasoning’ took the final step for Socratism.
Here I leave the Birth to engage with ideas which run through Nietzsche’s work. It is clear and
uncontroversial that he is certain that the self is necessarily embodied, that it is a bundle of drives
formed by the body which we are. He views Socrates as one of the ‘despisers of the body’. He
was a man who, on the point of his death, judged his mortal existence to be no good, and whose
work resulted in two millennia of metaphysical philosophy which Nietzsche committed his life’s
work to debunking. Nietzsche spent his career in constant opposition to the Socratic tradition
where ‘one school of philosophy succeeded another, wave after wave’ in an unending and
misguided search for ‘truth’, which is one thing Nietzsche does not value highly. The two are
clearly in opposition, and Nietzsche hates the legacy of Socrates, so it is likely hard to see how it
can be he simultaneously has a lot of respect for him.
It is important to point out here Nietzsche’s position against the metaphysical assumption that
oppositions arise from each other. He states that, rather, opposing ideas arise historically and can
coexist. So if Nietzsche loves and hates Socrates it is not a contradiction. They are separate
concepts. He has what might be called a Wildean relationship with Socrates. Recall the final
stanza of the Ballad of Reading Gaol:
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Nietzsche is the brave man. He loves Socrates so he must destroy him. In his lectures at Basel,
on the thinkers he described as the ‘pre-Platonic philosophers’, he says of Socrates ‘[he] is so
close to me that almost always I fight a fight against him.’ This fascinating sentence can be
blown open with a little character analysis. Nietzsche’s respect for Socrates stems from the
similarity of their predicaments. Both came along at a time of change, Nietzsche at the beginning
of mass society, and Socrates at a time when Athens needed a new God and a new method of
preservation, according to Nietzsche in the Birth. Both upset the order of things, standing in
opposition to their time. Socrates is an ugly plebeian, ‘rabble’ as described by Nietzsche, who
teaches the youth of Athens to question everything in order to get to the truth, and is put to death
for corrupting them. Nietzsche, two thousand years later, tells his readers to reject modernity and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/7fba4558-e608-427a-ba74-8c12a4340b30-160701093148/85/Writing-Sample-Nietzsche-2-320.jpg)
Writing Sample Nietzsche
- 1. Critically assess Nietzsche's treatment of the figure of Socrates. Nietzsche’s treatment of Socrates is a part of his thought that has divided scholars for as long as he has been studied. My aim in here is to provide support for the claim that Nietzsche regarded the figure of Socrates with intense respect as an equal, even if a misguided one, and knew that the thought and work of the Greek was important to his own. He knew that Nietzsche philosopher could not exist without Socrates the philosopher. My analysis begins with the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s earliest major publication, and the place he first assesses the figure of Socrates. Here Nietzsche portrays him, prima facie at least, as the great deistic opposition to the Greek tragic tradition. He is ‘antipodal’ to the Dionysian art, his ‘single great cyclopes eye’ fails to appreciate the madness and unreason that is central to the Greek tragedy. Here ‘causes appear to lack effects and effects seem to lack causes’ in complete opposition to the world Socrates occupies, a world of reason and causality, which can be made intelligible through thought and light can be cast on its shadowy workings. Nietzsche sees Socrates behind the playwright Euripides, whose work aimed to ‘excise that original and all powerful Dionysian element from tragedy and to rebuild purely on the basis of an un-Dionysian art, morality and worldview.’ The ‘daemon Socrates’ whose opposition is cause to kill off the tragic art that Nietzsche so admired, to kill the Greeks’ understanding that there are absurd things in the world that we cannot understand through reason alone. This is what they attempted to comprehend by engaging in Dionysian revel and tragedy. It is easy to see where those who espouse Nietzsche’s hatred of Socrates stand: if Socrates stands in opposition to the traditions that Nietzsche loves, how can he possibly admire him, or do anything other than despise him? In answering this question I refer to the middle sections of the Birth of tragedy, 13-15. Here, Nietzsche describes particularly the dying Socrates in reverential, deistic terms. What stands out is his assertion that he represents ‘the true eroticist’. The interpretations of this seemingly incongruous statement are many; those who oppose my view might see it as a typical piece of Nietzschean irony but it is likely there is more to it. Eroticism is bound up in Dionysus; a key part of the Dionysian revel being the losing of inhibition, enabling engagement with and submission to one’s bodily drives, one of which must certainly have been Eros, love between lovers. This world seems to sit in contrast to the sterile one of science and reason that Socrates brought with him, however the title ‘eroticist’ can certainly be applied without irony to the man himself. He, through reason and observation, wished to get to the heart of the world, to be intimately acquainted with all that surrounded him. Maybe this is not quite the same as the actions of a Dionysian reveller but there is something highly erotic and tragic about the uncovering done through Socratic reason. Not only that, the dying Socrates has taken the ultimate step for his art. He gives it all up for his vision of how reason can be, and there is eroticism in that bearing of life to the world. Even if Nietzsche doesn’t agree with the vision he
- 2. must respect a willingness to die in the quest to prepare the world something (or someone) new and greater. ‘The dying Socrates, the man elevated above fear of death through knowledge and reasoning’ took the final step for Socratism. Here I leave the Birth to engage with ideas which run through Nietzsche’s work. It is clear and uncontroversial that he is certain that the self is necessarily embodied, that it is a bundle of drives formed by the body which we are. He views Socrates as one of the ‘despisers of the body’. He was a man who, on the point of his death, judged his mortal existence to be no good, and whose work resulted in two millennia of metaphysical philosophy which Nietzsche committed his life’s work to debunking. Nietzsche spent his career in constant opposition to the Socratic tradition where ‘one school of philosophy succeeded another, wave after wave’ in an unending and misguided search for ‘truth’, which is one thing Nietzsche does not value highly. The two are clearly in opposition, and Nietzsche hates the legacy of Socrates, so it is likely hard to see how it can be he simultaneously has a lot of respect for him. It is important to point out here Nietzsche’s position against the metaphysical assumption that oppositions arise from each other. He states that, rather, opposing ideas arise historically and can coexist. So if Nietzsche loves and hates Socrates it is not a contradiction. They are separate concepts. He has what might be called a Wildean relationship with Socrates. Recall the final stanza of the Ballad of Reading Gaol: And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! Nietzsche is the brave man. He loves Socrates so he must destroy him. In his lectures at Basel, on the thinkers he described as the ‘pre-Platonic philosophers’, he says of Socrates ‘[he] is so close to me that almost always I fight a fight against him.’ This fascinating sentence can be blown open with a little character analysis. Nietzsche’s respect for Socrates stems from the similarity of their predicaments. Both came along at a time of change, Nietzsche at the beginning of mass society, and Socrates at a time when Athens needed a new God and a new method of preservation, according to Nietzsche in the Birth. Both upset the order of things, standing in opposition to their time. Socrates is an ugly plebeian, ‘rabble’ as described by Nietzsche, who teaches the youth of Athens to question everything in order to get to the truth, and is put to death for corrupting them. Nietzsche, two thousand years later, tells his readers to reject modernity and
- 3. philosophers to throw off the yoke of metaphysics that has occupied them since Socrates himself. Nietzsche clearly knew and respected that they had followed similar paths. Finally, I come to Nietzsche’s late writings. In the Twilight of the Idols there is a section called ‘the Problem of Socrates’ in which he gives the final objective account of the figure of Socrates, giving him a frighteningly polemical treatment. He calls the Greek ‘the buffoon who got himself taken seriously’ and ‘the cleverest of all self-out-witters’ in reference to his supposed ‘defeat’ of his own body and rejection of life, the triumph of ‘reason’ over the will which Nietzsche regarded as the ultimate self-denial. However, even in this section, more overt in its acidity toward Socrates, is full of reverential claims available upon reading between the lines. ‘He saw through his noble Athenians’ in a similar way to how Nietzsche saw behind modernity and philosophy. Also, in section 3, he shows how Socrates revelled in being an outsider, a monster, an ugly criminal sent to upset the Athenian order. It is fair to say that Nietzsche must have seen a lot of himself in that man taking ultimate pleasure in being a nuisance to the established way of things. In the Antichrist, Nietzsche’s discussion of Jesus Christ offers some insight into how he may have viewed the figure of Socrates. Jesus, according to Nietzsche, was a great man with a fine message that became corrupted in codification on the death of the man. Just as St Paul did Christ a great injustice in presuming to turn his message into a dogmatic religion, so Plato did the same for Socrates upon the death of his tutor. This is the reason Socrates was counted among the pre- Platonic thinkers – he is the last of them, before Plato established Socratism as the dominant method of philosophy, which Nietzsche saw and tore down. Socrates, according to this reading, remained a great man for Nietzsche, as did Christ. It was his followers who distorted the message. Here I have illuminated the best evidence that Nietzsche regarded Socrates as a great man, and a fine influence. The literature, primary and secondary, is so expansive that I am sure there is much more that I have not touched on, but from the evidence available to me it is clear that to view Nietzsche’s treatment of Socrates as that of an enemy would be very wrong.