49 how that immense drive wheel of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates and how we are compelled to see this through Socrates, as if we were looking through a shadow. That he himself had a premonition of this relationship comes out in the dignified seriousness with which he assessed his divine calling everywhere, even before his judges. To censure him for this was basically as impossible as to approve of his influence on the dissolution of instinct. When Socrates was hauled before the assembly of the Greek state, there was only one single form of sentence for this irreconcilable conflict, namely, banishment: people should have expelled him beyond the borders as something completely enigmatic, unclassifiable, inexplicable, so that some posterity could not justly indict the Athenians for acting shamefully. But the fact that death and not mere exile was pronounced over him Socrates himself appears to have brought about, fully clear about what he was doing and without the natural horror of death: he went to his death with that tranquillity Plato describes him showing as he leaves the Symposium, the last drinker in the early light of dawn, to start a new day, while behind him, on the benches and on the ground, his sleeping dinner companions stay behind, to dream of Socrates, the truly erotic man. The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the noble Greek youth, one never seen before. Above all, the typical Greek youth, Plato, prostrated himself before Socrates’ image with all the fervent adoration of his passionately enthusiastic soul. 14 Let’s now imagine that one great Cyclops eye of Socrates focussed on tragedy, that eye in which the beautiful madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed — let’s imagine how it was impossible for that eye to peer into the Dionysian abyss with a feeling of pleasure.1 What must that eye have actually seen in the “lofty and highly praised” tragic art, as Plato calls it? Something really unreasonable — causes without effects and effects which appeared to have no causes, and the whole so confused and with so many different elements that any reasonable disposition had to reject it, but dangerous tinder for sensitive and susceptible souls. We know which single form of poetry Socrates understood: Aesop’s fables, and he certainly did so with that smiling complacency with which the noble and good Gellert in his fable of the bee and the hen sings the praises of poetry: You see in me the use of poetry— To tell the man without much sense A picture image of the truth of things.2 But for Socrates tragic art did not seem “to speak the truth” at all, quite apart from the fact that it addressed itself to the man who “does not possess much sense,” and thus not to philosophers, a double excuse to keep one’s distance from it. Like Plato, he assigned it to the arts of cosmetics, which present only what is pleasant, not what is useful, and he therefore made the demand that his disciples abstain and strictly stay away from such unphilosophical temptations, with so much success that the youthful poet of tragedy, Plato, immediately burned his poetical writing, so that he could become Socrates’ 1 2
Cyclops: In Greek mythology a cyclops was a huge, one-eyed, cannibal monster living in the wilderness.
Gellert: Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715-1769), German poet and professor of philosophy, famous for his moralistic fables. Aesop: a sixth century BC Greek writer, by tradition a slave, who is known only for the moralistic tales which bear his name.