Socrates and the Death of Tragedy: A Dual Examination of Nietzsche’s Socratic Problem

McGill University

Socrates and the Death of Tragedy: A Dual Examination of Nietzsche’s Socratic Problem

Nico Wada PHIL367, Prof. Hoffmann Final Exam Essay, Question #4 Monday, December 10, 2018

In The Birth of Tragedy and Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche launches a broadside attack against one of the first practitioners of philosophy and the worshipper of individuated logic and rationality, Socrates. The source of Nietzsche’s problem with Socrates lies in the irreconcilable differences between Socrates’ values of reason, truth, and knowledge and Nietzsche’s own ideals expressed in The Birth of Tragedy. For Nietzsche, Socrates is both a historical figure as well as a straw man for all sorts of ideas in which Nietzsche wishes to encounter and attack. To provide a thorough investigation of the Socratic problem, I first examine Nietzsche’s flesh-and-blood characterization of Socrates in his appropriate sociohistorical context. While Socrates is heralded as the patron saint of Western philosophy, I explain how Nietzsche views the dialectician as the proximate cause of the decline of modern civilization. I then demonstrate how Socrates lends himself to an extended application for Nietzsche in what might be called thematization. As a voice, idea, and posture that can be resurrected at will, the spirit of Socrates has manifested itself in the philosophical and cultural traditions since the end of the Athenian fifth century down to the contemporary present.

Ultimately, the depth of Nietzsche’s Socratic problem can be grasped in its complexity through an understanding of Socrates as both an embodied and disembodied presence in Nietzsche’s corpus. Socrates is not only a man tarred for hastening the demise of a once-glorious Greek tragic culture, but a cultural vector with a force all its own, alluding to values that are antipodal to the ones in which Nietzsche holds most sacred.

An examination of the Socratic problem requires an antecedent explanation of Nietzsche’s philosophical canon. A survey of the ideas put forth in Nietzsche’s first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, allows for Nietzsche’s attitude towards Socrates to be evaluated in its proper context. The Birth of Tragedy ostensibly chronicles the creation and modifications of

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Greek drama, yet the work can more accurately be understood as an account of the dynamic processes of human creativity in general. In his account of the aesthetic, Nietzsche analyzes the tension between two agonistic forces, the Dionysian and Apollonian, which serve as the central principles in Greek culture. Apollo is etymologically the “lucent” one, the god of light, who Nietzsche claims “governs the lovely semblance produced by the inner world of fantasy.”1 This idea corresponds to Schopenhauer’s principium individuationis, or the principle of individuation, which accounts for the illusory distinctions made between objects, inanimate beings, and general phenomena in the world of representation. While the Apollonian element relates to individuation and the delimitation of boundaries, the Dionysian instinct is predicated on irrationality, chaos, unintelligibility and instinct. As the Greek wine god, Dionysus’ image invites associations of intoxication, ecstasy, abandon—moments where the individual character is submerged in a greater whole. Dionysiac stirrings therefore result in the collapse of the principium, causing “subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete self-forgetting.”2 As emphasized by Nietzsche, the Dionysian state is one of suffering, as beneath the veil of reason lies an omnipotent Will.

Following Schopenhauer, this Will is characterized by a Urwiderspruch, or primal contradiction, and reveals the “suffering inherent in life.”3 While the ancient Greeks possessed Dionysian wisdom and “knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence,” they nonetheless embraced this truth by expressing it through artistic mediums, most notably tragedy.4 Hellenic tragedy, Nietzsche finds, magnificently succeeds in “redirect[ing] those repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live.”5 The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and others of 1

F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, Cambridge UP, 1999, 16.

Ibid, 17.

3 Ibid, 80.

4 Ibid, 23.

5 Ibid, 40.

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the Hellenic period achieve a delicate but powerful balance between Dionysian insight into the chaos and suffering which underlies all existence and the clarity of rational Apollonian form.

Nietzsche’s admiration for the Hellenic Greeks, and by extension their tragic culture, is rooted in their profound realization that only as an aesthetic phenomenon could existence and the world be justified. Ultimately, the Greek tragic sentiment that Nietzsche praises is a “yes-saying to life, a joyous affirmation even of the terrible and horrible, of death and decay.”6 The Birth of Tragedy not only outlines the appearance of Greek tragedy in Hellenic society, but also explains how Socrates’ introduction (and Plato’s furtherance) of a rationalistic philosophy destroys its preexisting cultural grounds. To elucidate just how Socrates commits his heinous crime of bringing about the death of tragedy, I first examine Socrates as a historical figure. The Platonic accounts of Socrates’ peregrinations throughout Athens chronicle his paradigmatic form of philosophical inquiry, namely that of cross-examination or elenchus. The process of education through the elenchus is not a matter of correct instruction, but rather one of rational elicitation. Through questioning the knowledge claims of his interlocutors, Socrates reveals how their inconsistent statements betray deficiencies in their beliefs. Upon interrogating a variety of distinguished Athenian citizens, Socrates registers with astonishment how these celebrities lack a proper understanding of their professions and practice them “only by instinct.”7 This repudiation of “instinct” in favor of articulated knowledge is described by Nietzsche as “the heart and center of the Socratic tendency.”8 Additionally, the self-expressive, self-revealing, and potentially self-reformative nature of participation in the elenchus renders it a powerful tool for moral education. Socrates’ moral principle is therefore one in which reason alone provides the

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E. Fink, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, tr. G. Richter, Continuum, 2003, 10.

F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, Cambridge UP, 1999, 66.

8 Ibid, 66.

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framework through which both the attainment of virtues and the achievement of fundamental happiness are made possible.

Nietzsche rejects the Socratic doctrine identifying reason with virtue, and virtue with happiness, referring to it as “the bizarrest of equations and one which has in particular all the instincts of the older Hellenes against it.”9 As I previously explored, the artist of “older Hellenes” uses the vehicle of tragedy to communicate deep and incomprehensible emotions into the language of images. The creative drive behind tragedy is therefore not reason, but instinct— a term referred to synonymously by Nietzsche as “Dionysiac stirrings” of the will.10 By countering the “dark desires” of instinct, Socrates’ moral principle aims to “produce a permanent daylight—the daylight of reason.”11 The first to pit rationality against instinct, Socrates displays a “hypertrophy” of the “logical urge” that Nietzsche judges to be “pseudo-Greek.”12 Additionally, in ascribing knowledge and understanding “the power of a panacea,” Socrates appears to Nietzsche as “the archetype of the theoretical optimist.”13 Nietzsche regards Socrates’ optimism, his belief that existence can be somehow “corrected” through a quest for truth, as both a fallacy and an illness. By affirming a world in which absolute knowledge can make life understandable, Socrates demonstrates a misunderstanding of existence as Nietzsche understands it to be, namely incomprehensible suffering and contradiction. Value judgments for or against life, Nietzsche explains, “can…never be true” because the value of life is inestimable.14 By seeking refuge in an illusion of control on which virtue and knowledge and happiness neatly align, Socrates displays a condemnation of life

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F. Nietzsche, “The Problem of Socrates,” Twilight of the Idols, tr. M. Tanner, Penguin, 1990, 41.

F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, Cambridge UP, 1999, 17.

11 F. Nietzsche, “The Problem of Socrates,” Twilight of the Idols, tr. M. Tanner, Penguin, 1990, 43.

12 Ibid, 40.

13 F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, Cambridge UP, 1999, 74.

14 F. Nietzsche, “The Problem of Socrates,” Twilight of the Idols, tr. M. Tanner, Penguin, 1990, 40.

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which amounts to self-condemnation. Because only a suffering creature condemns himself, Nietzsche characterizes Socrates as an invalid and his morality of improvement as a “form of sickness” that succeeds in destroying the resplendent “health” of Hellenic tragic culture.15 Socrates’ profound influence on his fellow Athenians results in a contagious spread of his beliefs, the triumph of reason over instinct, and ultimately the death of tragedy. As a historical figure, Socrates is therefore a problem for Nietzsche—with his poisonous optimism, he singlehandedly corrupts Hellenic society and functions as “the one turning point and vortex of socalled world history.”16 Nietzsche’s disparaging portrait of Socrates prefaces his broader understanding of Socrates as a force. Nietzsche describes the “unfettered flow” of Socrates’ logical drive as comparable to a “power of nature such as we encounter, to our awed surprise, only in the very greatest instinctual forces.”17 This impressive characterization likens Socrates to a deity—an equal of Dionysus and Apollo. Nietzsche’s theory of instincts therefore expands to include, alongside the Apollonian and Dionysian drives, the Socratic drive, otherwise referred to as “aesthetic Socratism.” Debased as the “murderous principle” in Greek tragedy, aesthetic Socratism has as its axiom the requirement that everything must be “intelligible” if it is to be considered “beautiful.”18 With this canon in mind, the ancient playwright Euripides regarded the tragic dramas of the preceding generation as irrational and incommensurable in that they had “a certain deceiving definiteness, and at the same time a puzzling depth, indeed infinity, in the background.”19 In an effort to correct what he perceived as a flawed art form, Euripides wrote his tragedies on the basis of an aesthetic Socratism. First “measur[ing] every single element— 15

Ibid, 44.

F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, Cambridge UP, 1999, 74.

17 Ibid, 67.

18 Ibid, 64.

19 Ibid, 58.

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language, characters, dramatic construction, choral music,” Euripides then proceeded to rectify the drama according to the Socratic principle of intelligibility.20 Nietzsche suggests that a prime illustration of the playwright’s “rationalistic method” is the Euripidean prologue, whereby a trusted character addresses the audience as to the plot, the circumstances, and the other characters involved in the drama preceding the action they are about to witness.21 Resulting from this notion of “beauty as intelligibility,” the familiarity of the spectator’s own emotions substitutes for the “enjoyable self-abandonment” and transfiguration that Nietzsche associates with the Dionysian element in tragedy.22 Euripides’ all-too-self-conscious manipulations of tragedy therefore convey a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, namely disorderly, chaotic, and rife with suffering. In addition to the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, a new opposition therefore arises: the Dionysiac versus the Socratic. As Nietzsche defines tragedy in terms of the harmonious fusion between Apollonian and Dionysian elements, the dialectic shift from the Dionysian to the Socratic principle results in the disturbance of this balance and the death of tragedy. Nietzsche emphasizes that Euripides’ aesthetic Socratism is merely a symptom of “the enormous driving-wheel of logical Socratism…in motion, as it were, behind Socrates.”23 From a historical perspective, Socratism is an eternal disease—a fundamental phenomenon of human expression and historical development “down to the present moment and even into all future time.”24 Examined both as an embodied figure and an unstoppable force, Socrates is a problem for Nietzsche. As outlined in The Birth of Tragedy, Athenian tragedy is a product of the tension between two antipodal forces, namely Apollonian reason and Dionysian ecstasy. Nietzsche 20

Ibid, 62.

Ibid, 62.

22 Ibid, 62.

23 Ibid, 67.

24 Ibid, 71.

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admires Hellenic Greeks for embracing life, and its inevitable characteristic of suffering, through the development of a tragic culture. As the first “man of science,” Socrates’ chief laws can be codified succinctly as: virtue is knowledge, all sins are the result of ignorance, and the virtuous man is the happy man. With these optimistic moral principles, Socrates attempts to “correct” Athenian society yet destroys the fundamental vivacity at the heart of Hellenic tragic culture. As a result of Socrates’ profound influence and idolization during his lifetime and throughout history, Nietzsche regards him as the problematic “turning point” of Western civilization and indeed a redoubtable “power of nature.”25 Socratism, Nietzsche explains, composes “the most illustratious opposition to the tragic view of the world.”26 The depth of Nietzsche’s problem with Socrates can ultimately be grasped through this understanding of Socrates as both an embodied figure and disembodied spirit. Socrates is at once the anti-hero of Greek tragic culture and a formidable force embodying principles that are antipodal to Nietzsche’s most sacredly held values.

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Ibid, 67.

Ibid, 76.

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Annotated Bibliography 1. Evangeliou, Christos. “Nietzsche on Tragedy and Socrates.” Phronimon, Volume 4, Number 1, 2003, p. 18-38.

Evangeliou explores Nietzsche’s accusation of Socrates as responsible for the untimely death of Greek tragedy. He specifically explores Nietzsche’s treatment of the historic Socrates and concludes that Nietzsche truly had no appreciation or admiration for the Athenian philosopher.

This source provided me with a succinct overview of Nietzsche’s objection to Socratism and a clear outline of Socrates’ pernicious influence on Greek tragedy.

2. Evans, Daw-Nay. “Socrates as Nietzsche’s Decadent in Twilight of the Idols.” Philosophy and Literature, Volume 34, Number 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press: October 2010, p. 340-347, DOI: 10.1353/phl.2010.0009.

Evans provides a useful examination of the problem that Socrates represents for Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. He argues that Nietzsche uses Socrates and Socrates’ principles of reason to launch his greater attack on the methods of Western philosophy in general. This journal article was of particular use to me since Evans presents, in a most clear and comprehensible way, a delineation of Socrates’ philosophical canon.

3. Fink, Eugen. Nietzsche’s Philosophy, translated by G. Richter, Continuum, 2003.

Fink’s work serves as a survey of the Nietzschean corpus. Fink primarily explores how Nietzsche presents an absolute, decisive rejection of the past, an overturning of all traditions, and an appeal to a radical reversal. In his overview of The Birth of Tragedy, Fink provided me with a helpful analysis of Nietzsche’s claim that Greek tragedy is “life-affirming.”

4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, translated by R. Guess and R. Speirs. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Nietzsche references Socrates and Socratism in The Birth of Tragedy through his condemnation of Euripides’ plays and reference to the oppositional relationship between the Socratic and Dionysiac forces. This source therefore contributed greatly to my greater understanding of Nietzsche’s problem of Socrates.

5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Problem of Socrates.” Twilight of the Idols, translated by M. Tanner. Penguin, 1990.

As evident from the chapter title, Twilight of the Idols specifically explores the problem of Socrates and provided me with direct insight into the topic I have explored in this essay.