Nietzsche’s Socrateases

Nietzsche’s Socrateases – plural, with two ‘a’s: multiplicity, with a hint of play. For Nietzsche, Socrates is ‘the most questionable phenomenon of antiquity’. Nietzsche can claim that ‘Socrates … stands so close to me that I am fighting a battle with him almost all the time’; also that ‘Socrates was from the gutter’ and, perhaps, ‘a typical criminal’; but then again, that ‘I admire Socrates’ courage and wisdom’; and yet again, that ‘Socrates suffered from life’. These (and there are more) are different Socrate(a)ses, representing, in part, different phases in Nietzsche’s career;1 in any case, representing

different explorations from one whose philosophy, arguably, has its own ultimate coherence, but is also essentially exploratory: a philosophy that centres on explorations, and on a capacity to reconsider, from one exploration to another. Nietzsche’s relationship with Socrates is often misrepresented, especially by those who are warmly disposed towards Nietzsche, but feel the same about Socrates, and in a good-hearted sort of way convince themselves that Nietzsche really felt the same too. This amiable confusion is typified, in recent years, by Alexander Nehamas, whose discussion of the two thinkers is noteworthy – and not only for showing more interest in Socrates than in Nietzsche (which is not a mistake that Nietzsche himself was in any danger of making), but for a very un-Nietzschean, though also in a sense neoNietzschean, attempt to assimilate this German to that Greek.2 For Nehamas, Nietzsche, after some initial hostility, becomes ‘fond’ of Socrates in mid-career. Referring to Nietzsche’s early enthusiasm for the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer and his protracted relationship with the composer, Richard Wagner, Nehamas comments:

Again, Nehamas calls Socrates one of Nietzsche’s ‘educators’ – in effect, one of Nietzsche’s formative influences – and adds: ‘Socrates was the only one among Nietzsche’s “educators” from whom he could never be sure he had emancipated himself’,3 This is all very confused. For Nietzsche, Wagner is and forever remains a supreme personal event; the one creative genius Nietzsche ever knows or will know personally; his paradigm of the great artist and, eventually, of the great decadent.4 Schopenhauer, meanwhile, is a major, and very specific, influence in Nietzsche’s youth and at the very start of his philosophical career: ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ (sic) is the title of one of his four Unfashionable Meditations (written in the mid-1870s), just as ‘Richard Wagner

in Bayreuth’ is the title of another.5 By comparison, Socrates was a continual challenge and a provocation, but not (in any straightforward sense) an influence: neither an ‘educator’ from whom Nietzsche had any need to be ‘emancipated’ nor a figure of whom he could possibly be ‘fond’6 – and not only, or not so much, because, unlike Wagner, he is not a flesh-and-blood acquaintance, but because, unlike Wagner and Schopenhauer too, Socrates composed nothing and wrote nothing. This is crucial, and it is richly symptomatic of the way that many philosophical readers of Nietzsche, like Nehamas, misread him, that they miss the point. At all phases of his career, Nietzsche is and aspires to be a philosopher-artist.7 He is and aspires to be a creator, and, correlatively, is deeply concerned with the psychology, ontology, even theology and antitheology, of creativity. Socrates, notoriously, is the thinker who writes nothing and creates nothing, and, beyond that, mounts a specific challenge to traditional modes of creativity in art. Socrates, in Plato’s vivid depictions, seeks truth, seeks virtue, but rejects existing paths to truth and virtue. His is a new path of dialectical endeavour, whereby the seeker proceeds towards the new by posing questions and, by questioning, prepares to eliminate the old. First and foremost, it is Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, who cross-examines the poets about their poetry, supposedly in the hope of learning what they, or it, might mean, only to discover that they compose not ‘by wisdom’ (sophiâi), but by some kind of natural instinct (phusei tini), which is not, and cannot be, itself a kind of wisdom.8 For Plato’s Socrates, instinctive wisdom is a contradiction in terms, and if poetry – and art in general – is instinctive, Socrates is its enemy.9 As an enemy of art, Socrates (for Nietzsche, as for Plato) is and remains a challenge, but (for Nietzsche, unlike for Plato) Socrates is not, cannot be, an educator. Like an educator, though, Socrates is arguably part of Nietzsche’s personal experience (and not just part of his personal demonology). How can this be? Remarkably, throughout his philosophical career and its many Socratic, or anti-Socratic, explorations, Nietzsche tends to bypass the familiar issue of distinguishing a ‘real’ Socrates from the Platonic or other versions. In his

published work, in point of fact, he hardly ever alludes to any version, even to Plato’s, as distinct from his own,10 albeit, of course, his own variously distinctive versions are themselves constructed on Platonic, among other, foundations. Despite their idiosyncrasy, both singly and collectively, he treats each of his own Socrate(a)ses as definitive, as if equally authentic, in the way (no doubt) that personal experience is definitive, because authentic. And this, perhaps, is the strongest argument for concluding that, in a very particular sense, Socrates – though not (pace Nehamas) one of Nietzsche’s ‘educators’, nor a repository he is able to draw on, let alone can be said to be ‘fond’ of – is indeed part of Nietzsche’s personal experience. If nothing else, his constructions of Socrates have a personal weight. The importance of Socrates to Nietzsche stems, above all, from his participation in the great age of ancient Greece. For Nietzsche, ‘the Greeks remain the supreme cultural event of history’, just as Socrates himself remains their ‘most questionable phenomenon’.11 The two quotations effectively span Nietzsche’s creative career: the first belongs to 1888, the second to 1872. Those seventeen years of intense and intensely lived philosophizing begin with the young Professor of Classics in Basel in Switzerland (1869-79), proud possessor of an array of neo-Romantic espousals – of art and a metaphysics of art, of Schopenhauer, of Germany, of the Greeks – all grandly deployed in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872). Here Socrates is identified as a turning point in the cultural history of Greece and, as such, a crucial figure in the cultural history of the Western world. He is, in particular, the prime embodiment of Socratism: a complex archetypal figure, but one whose overall significance is clearly negative or, at best, equivocal. The Birth of Tragedy famously constructs a version of ‘the tragic’ from the twin models of Aeschylean-Sophoclean tragedy and Wagnerian music-drama. Tragedy was born in Greece, and is in process of rebirth in Germany. Tragedy is more than a theatrical genre: it is a profound, in fact the most profound, expression of life, and possible only in a culture which both acknowledges the dark destructive truths of the human condition and celebrates existence, nevertheless, through beauty, individuated form, illusion. The horror and the truth is symbolized by Dionysus, the illusory beauty of individuated form by Apollo.12 Into this sublime world of Hellenic acknowledgement and celebration enters the Socratic spirit of dissociated rationality. Hitherto, one gathers

(Nietzsche is elusive on this point), rationality has had its proper place as, presumably (though Nietzsche never quite admits it), one facet of the Apolline. But by the end of the fifth century, Socratic rationality rules (as, in our modern world, it rules again, and perhaps even more comprehensively). At the creative centre, tragedy is subverted by Socratism in the guise of Euripides, for whom beauty depends on intelligibility (‘alles muss verständig sein, um schön zu sein’). Momentous in itself, this ‘aesthetic Socratism’ (‘aesthetischer Sokratismus’) is actually a specific instance of a more general, and yet more momentous, optimism at the heart of the Socratic creed, which centres on the conviction that life itself is reasonable. And however much such a view of a rationalising Euripides is at odds with our own generation’s readings of this tragedian, it is the young Nietzsche’s view, and a view inseparable from his estimation of Socrates and Socratism and of the distinctive importance of the Socratic/Socratistic itself.13 According to The Birth of Tragedy, Socrates embodies the spirit of logic and dialectic, pure thought and dissociated rationality – all summed up, for Nietzsche, in the German word for the learning and the science that are among the ultimate products of that rationalistic spirit: Wissenschaft. And, in particular, Socrates embodies the optimism of Wissenschaft. He does not accept the underlying conditions of existence: he thinks he can change them by thought, can think his way to a solution, can use thought to conquer the fear of dying, can ‘correct Being by Knowing’ (‘dass das Denken das Sein … zu corrigieren im Stande sei’). As such, he dismisses all traditional instinctualintuitive responses to life, including, not least, those of the poets, who operate ‘only by instinct’ (‘nur aus Instinct’) – with which dismissive phrase he subverts the whole creative basis of Greek art and culture.14 With all his denials (Nietzsche insists), Socrates creates nothing, and what Socrates and Socratism deny above all is Dionysus, the ultimate creative principle. Therefore (and for Nietzsche this bit of logic is unchallengeable), Socratism can have no Apollo: without suffering, no beauty; without darkness, no light; without truth, no redeeming illusion. Socrates himself is not an artist; is dismissive of art; has no understanding of art. As such, Socrates is (yes) a ‘monstrosity’ (‘eine Monstrosität’) and (yes) ‘the most questionable phenomenon of antiquity’ (‘diese fragwürdigste Erscheinung

des Alterthums’). In misunderstanding art, he is misunderstanding existence – which is itself an art-work – or (at least) only as an art-work, or (as Nietzsche puts it) ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon’, can existence be ‘eternally justified’.15 In terms of the constitutive symbols of The Birth of Tragedy, Socrates represents a direct and drastic challenge to Dionysus; and because the Dionysiac is the life-blood of tragedy, the theoretical world-view of which Socrates is spokesman represents the supreme challenge to the tragic worldview. It may seem paradoxical that the Socratic-Socratistic world-view should be so powerful, when its outcomes – from the ‘cynicism’ of Socrates’ corrupted pupil Plato to the debasements of the journalistic-academic culture of Nietzsche’s own day – are apparently so disappointing.16 Yet the power of the Socratic-Socratistic is made very clear. Socrates is not merely incompatible with Dionysus, or opposed to Dionysus; he is opposite to Dionysus. Ontologically, he is surely nothing, next to Dionysus; pragmatically, though, he is commensurate with Dionysus and, as Nietzsche’s vivid language assures us, apparently even a sort of divinity like Dionysus. He operates with ‘divine naïveté and assurance’ (‘göttliche Naivetät und Sicherheit’); he is a ‘newborn daemon’ (‘neugeborner Dämon’), a ‘demigod’ (‘Halbgott’) and a ‘daemonic power’ (‘dämonische Kraft’); we are to recognize in him ‘the new Orpheus who rose up against Dionysus’ (‘den neuen Orpheus, der sich gegen Dionysus erhebt’). And a particular proof of divine affinity is his aptly named daimonion (‘Dämonion’): that strange negative impulse, recorded by Plato, which could not inspire Socrates to act, but only to hold back from action.17 Paradox among paradoxes: the overpowering nature of Socrates’ rationality is proof that this rationality is itself a divine force. That is, Socrates’ rationalizing disposition to reject everything that works ‘only by instinct’ is itself an instinct and, as such, must have, ultimately, a lifeenhancing positive power – which is the position that Nietzsche, by his own version of rational argument, proceeds to adumbrate in this first, extraordinary book. Not only is there now a new and honourable ‘mode of existence’ (‘Daseinsform’), which Nietzsche calls ‘theoretical man’

(‘theoretischer Mensch’), and of which Socrates is the archetype; in particular, he argues, Socratism has the capacity to expose its own limits. Driven by the illusory optimism that is essential to it, the ‘scientific’ spirit is carried irresistibly onwards to its very ‘horizons’, where that optimism ‘runs aground’.18 The first signs of that process are to be found (we learn) in the mighty philosophies of modern Germany, in Kantian critiques and Schopenhauerian pessimisms, albeit these are not quite Nietzsche’s critiques and no longer Nietzsche’s pessimisms. At all events, the ultimate logic of Socratic logic is to undo itself; and at the appalling moment when the full force of this cataclysm becomes clear, ‘tragic understanding [‘die tragische Erkenntniss’] breaks through – which, merely to be endured, needs art as protection and remedy [‘als Schutz und Heilmittel’]’.19 Thus can contemporary culture be transformed into a new tragic age, a Wagnerian age, in which dark Dionysiac truth is acknowledged and Apolline art re-forms in all its profuse diversity.20 But there is something more. Amidst this hoped-for profusion, Nietzsche floats a new, paradoxical possibility suited, maybe, to the modern world, ‘the birth of an artistic Socrates’ (‘die Geburt eines “künstlerischen Sokrates”’): a vision of a new kind of being, that can only be wholly unlike Socrates himself – the inartistic one, the despiser and misunderstander of art. The ‘artistic Socrates’ is a vision of the philosopher-artist, and, as such, a model for, and ultimately a model of, Nietzsche himself, who, as a uniquely qualified post-Socratic, ‘shares the dilemma and repudiates it’.21 Correspondingly, The Birth of Tragedy itself is a first attempt at a hybrid philosophical idiom, in which art is enacted, as well as – merely – explicated.22 Throughout his career, Nietzsche will conduct versions of this enacted argument against argument, experimenting with one art-mode after another, from the heated imagery of the first book to the shaped aphorisms of his later collections, from the expansive prose poetry of Zarathustra to the

personal voicings of his last work – and, in the first instance, the experiment bears Socrates’ name. With or without the ‘artistic Socrates’, Nietzsche’s response to Socrates is a distinctive one. From familiar ancient sources (mostly Plato), and with a bit of unacknowledged help from Hegel (whose Socrates is already a turningpoint in history), and also a cue or two from Aristophanes (whose seeming hostility to the philosopher is explicitly commended), Nietzsche constructs a new, complex archetype.23 The energy that has gone into the construction reflects both Socrates’ representative place in Greek cultural history and his ability to symbolise the problem of the place of thought in life: a problem that needs to be faced and worked through (and here indeed we can find some common ground with Nehamas) in the attempt to understand the possibilities of humankind both then and now. And Socrates, though notionally then, does assuredly exert a presence, for Nietzsche, now. The positive symptom of this presence, widely overlooked but richly revealing, is the peculiar way that Nietzsche presents Socrates in a kind of psycho-dramatic fiction, whereby the reader is invited into a kind of ‘secret history’ by which are made visible the inner workings, with or without a correlative outer context, of the (un)creative mind. Elsewhere in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche does this with Euripides:

as in his later writings he does it with Wagner,

and with God:

In this first book he also does it, and very explicitly, with Socrates:

In Nietzsche’s writing, the psychodramatic mode is often accompanied by a hint of a tease, as here with the caricaturing overstatement of the ‘Cyclops eye’ (we all know the remorseless Socrates is no pin-up, but …), as indeed also with the seemingly ironic understatement of the ‘pleasure’ of a look into the abyss. More important: the mode signifies problem and presence, and Socrates is both. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche sets out to subvert a traditional image of Greece as an ideal realm of serene, optimistic, rational enlightenment, which he does, not least, by redefining Socrates as an eccentricity and an aberration, albeit an aberration of central significance, for Greece and for the world to come. This argument is both qualified and amplified in two unpublished writings of the following years. In ‘Science and Wisdom in Conflict’ (‘Wissenschaft und Weisheit im Kampfe’), a set of notes from 1875,26 Nietzsche is concerned to place Socrates against the earlier traditions of Greek philosophy. The Socrates that emerges from this scrutiny is like, but not identical with, the Socrates of The Birth of Tragedy. The portrayal is still hostile, perhaps more hostile, but the grounds of the hostility have shifted. The Presocratic philosophers, from Thales to Democritus, constitute (Nietzsche tells us) a series of unique figures, each reaching out towards a higher wisdom, each responding to his predecessors in an open-minded spirit; but with Socrates, this series comes to an end. In Empedocles and Democritus, in particular, Greek thought can be seen to be moving towards ‘a correct appraisal of the pain and irrationality of existence’ – but just at the most sensitive moment, along comes Socrates, with his ‘odious pretension to happiness’ (‘die garstige Pretension auf Glück’) and his ‘cold-prudential virtue’ (‘die kalt-kluge Tugendhaftigkeit’), and the chance is lost. Socrates now diverts, and subverts, the whole course of Greek thinking into moralistic abstractions, with momentous consequences. He creates a

following for those ‘unpleasant abstractions, “Goodness” and Justice”’ (‘die greuliche Abstrakta, “das Gute, das Gerechte”’). He makes ‘anxiety about the self’ (‘Angst um sich selbst’) the soul of philosophy and turns the natural activity of living into a kind of virtuoso specialism, almost a kind of professional expertise. With Socrates, the open-mindedness and independent-mindedness of Greek philosophy is at an end: he needs followers; the logic of his quest is ‘to reproduce himself’ (‘selbst zu erzeugen’); he belongs with the sectarianism of the philosophical schools – Platonists and Peripatetics, Epicureans and Stoics – that come after him.27 From these propositions it is apparent that the earlier stress on Socrates the rationalist has given way to a critical focus on Socratic ethics and (more generally) Socratic humanism, which was implicit in The Birth of Tragedy, but not foregrounded there. Significantly, it is in this set of hostile notes that we find the confession that ‘Socrates … stands so close to me that I am fighting a battle with him almost all the time’ (‘Sokrates … steht mir so nahe, dass ich fast immer einen Kampf mit ihm kämpfe’): the context of that dictum sufficiently indicates how far Nietzsche is from any sense of ‘fondness’ for his problematic subject.28 In ‘Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks’ (‘Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen’, written slightly earlier, in 1873), Nietzsche surveys the same period, albeit in more continuous prose.29 Quite which Socrates this short treatise would have presented is an open question, because at Anaxagoras, before Socrates, it breaks off. Perhaps significantly, though, here we learn not only that ‘the Greeks invented the archetypes of philosophical thought’, but that the archetypal series runs, or is due to run, past Democritus to include Socrates himself. But whatever else he might be, this Socrates, at least, cannot be the originator of dissociated thought, because that title seems here to have been won by Parmenides, whose abstractness is strongly contrasted with the intuitive philosophizing of Heraclitus.30 To judge from Nietzsche’s notes of a few years earlier – the

years during which the symbols and the schemata of The Birth of Tragedy were worked out – his original candidate for the title of first Greek rationalist was neither Socrates nor even Parmenides, but actually Democritus.31 The symbolic-representative character of the ‘Socrates’ of The Birth of Tragedy is at this point peculiarly apparent. The next phase of Nietzsche’s career is marked by ill health, by his resignation from his university position (in 1879), and by a series of volumes of aphorisms written between 1878 and 1882: Human, All Too Human (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches), Dawn (Morgenröte) and Light-Hearted Philosophy (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft: usually translated Gay Science). With these books Nietzsche’s outlook shifts from the part-metaphysical to the part-positivist, from a neo-Romantic appeal to ‘divinity’ to a sort of perspectival atheism, directed against Christianity in particular. Now liberated from Schopenhauer, from Wagner, from Germany, Nietzsche looks to France – to Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire – and is even disposed to rethink the significance and meaning of art. With the Greeks themselves, he is now more open-minded, and Socrates is one of the beneficiaries of this open-mindedness. The new state of mind produces new Socrate(a)ses, both with and without the extra ‘a’. Against Christianity, the philosopher can be enlisted as an ally. In one aphorism, the martyred Socrates is praised ahead of Jesus for his ‘greater understanding’ (‘grösserer Verstand’), his ‘wisdom’ (‘Weisheit’) and, in particular, the ‘light-hearted character of his seriousness’ (‘die fröhliche Art des Ernstes’).32 At the same time a new archetypal Socrates comes into view: ‘the paths of the most diverse philosophical modes of life [‘die Strassen der verschiedensten philosophischen Lebensweisen’] lead back to him’.33 Now able to entertain the quasi-Platonic thought that ‘poets tell lies’ and the quasi-Platonic-Socratic position that ‘artists often don’t know what they do best’, Nietzsche, no doubt, is less offended by a noncreator (albeit both those claims are voiced without explicit reference to Socrates himself).34 However, other characterizations from this period are more equivocal. Socrates discovered the ‘charm’ (‘Zauber’) of cause and effect, and thus became the instigator of the modern taste for causal logic – but this is hardly Nietzsche’s taste, at this or any stage of his thinking.35 Yes, ‘I admire Socrates’

courage and wisdom [‘Tapferkeit und Weisheit’] in everything he did, said – and did not say’, but then (there is, of course, a ‘but then’) ‘I do wish he had been silent at that last moment of his life; maybe then he would have belonged to an even higher class of spirits’ [‘eine noch höhere Ordnung der Geister’].36 And Nietzsche goes on to confront Socrates’ famous last words, mythologized in Plato’s Phaedo, ‘we owe a cock to Asclepius’.37 Asclepius is god of medicine, so that, on Nietzsche’s caustic reading, the words invite the gloss, ‘life is a sickness’ (‘das Leben ist eine Krankheit’), and the ultimate commitment of the seemingly optimistic instigator is exposed as a weak pessimism: ‘Socrates suffered from life. And with these veiled, terrible, pious and blasphemous words he took his revenge’ [‘Sokrates hat am Leben gelitten! Und er hat noch seine Rache dafür genommen – mit jenem verhüllten, schauerlichen, frommen und blasphemischen Worte!’].38 Again, in this same period, and with no equivocation, Socrates (along, now, with Plato) is charged with the ‘most profound mistake’ (‘jener tiefste Irrthum’) about morality: the belief that right knowledge engenders right action.39 To this period, too, belongs a quaint suggestion about Socrates’ daimonion: ‘perhaps an ear-infection [‘ein Ohrenleiden’], which, in accordance with the moralising mode of thought he was ruled by [‘seine herrschende moralische Denkungsart’], he only interpreted differently from the way it would be interpreted now’.40 If this seems an obvious enough tease, it is nevertheless a damaging one. The extraordinary inner voice which, for the young Nietzsche, was evidence of divine powers is now reduced to a deeply unglamorous medical condition, and a chapter in the history of revealed religion to a case study for the pathologist. Meanwhile, closer inspection of the praise of Socrates over Jesus reveals that Socrates’ ‘wisdom’ there is actually a ‘trickster’s wisdom’ (‘Weisheit voller Schelmenstreiche’).41 In short: while we certainly have some new Socrate(a)ses from this phase of Nietzsche’s work, the signs of admiration for Socrates here are conditional and problematic. One cannot plausibly isolate them, let alone convert them into some long-held view of Socrates as the ‘ideal philosopher’, however familiar that kind of false move may have become in readings of Nietzsche and his ideas.42