ABSTRACT
Socrates judged life as an illness from which one can recover only by dying. What is significant in this claim, however, is not its truth value. Discussing whether life is an illness or not presupposes that one can judge life from an external point of view while one is alive. ‘One would have to be situated outside life . . . to be permitted to touch on the problem of the value of life at all: sufficient reason for understanding that this problem is for us an inaccessible problem’ (Nietzsche 1969: 45). Therefore, Socrates’ judgment reveals another, more significant problem, the problem of negating life, or of nihilism. Socrates is the first exponent of a long tradition of thought that stands in a negative relation to life. He turned reason, will to truth, into a weapon, a new agon, with which he criticized the dominant decadent values of his time. However, by elevating reason to the level of a supreme value, he also undermined the very agonistic instincts of his contemporaries in Greece (ibid. 32). In postulating rationality as the supreme principle of the world, he destabilized the ground on which values are created, that is, life.
