The Problem of Socrates
1
IN every age the wisest have
passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless.... Everywhere
and always their mouths have uttered the same sound - a sound full of doubt,
full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to
life. Even Socrates said as he died: 'To live - that means to be a long time sick: I owe a cock to
the saviour Asclepius'. [According to Plato ('Phaedo'),
Socrates' last words were: "Crito, I owe a cock
to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the
debt?" One gave a cock to Asclepius on recovering from an illness: Socrates seems to
be saying that life is, or his life has been, an illness.]
Even Socrates had had enough of it. - What does that prove? What does it point to? - Formerly one
would have said ( - of, and did say, and loudly
enough, and our pessimists [Specifically
the followers of Schopenhauer, among whom Nietzsche himself was numbered in his
young days.] most of all!):
'Here at any rate there must be something true!
The consensus sapientium [Unanimity of the wise.] is proof of truth.' - Shall we still
speak thus today? are we allowed to do so? 'Here at any rate there must be something sick'
- this is our retort: one ought to take a closer look at them, these
wisest of every age! Were they all of
them perhaps no longer steady on their legs? belated? tottery? décadents? Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth as a
raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion? ...
2
This irreverent notion that
the great sages are declining types first dawned on me in regard to just
the case in which learned and unlearned prejudice is most strongly opposed to
it: I recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay, as agents of the
dissolution of Greece, as pseudo-Greek, as anti-Greek (Birth of Tragedy,
1872). [Nietzsche's first
published book.] That consensus sapientium
- I saw more and more clearly - proves least of all that they were right about
what they were in accord over: it proves rather that they themselves, these
wisest men, were in some way in physiological accord since they stood - had
to stand - in the same negative relation to life. Judgements, value judgements concerning life,
for or against, can in the last resort never be true:
they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms
- in themselves such judgements are stupidities. One must reach out and try to grasp this
astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by a living man, because he is a party to
the dispute, indeed its object, and not the judge of it; not by the dead one,
for another reason. - For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of
life thus even constitutes an objection to him, a question-mark as to his
wisdom, a piece of unwisdom.
- What? and all these great wise men - they have not
only been décadents, they have not even been
wise? - But I shall get back to the problem of Socrates.
3
Socrates belonged, in his
origins, to the lowest orders: Socrates was rabble. One knows, one sees
for oneself, how ugly he was. But ugliness,
an objection in itself, is among Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is frequently enough the sigh of a
thwarted development, a development retarded by interbreeding. Otherwise it appears as a development in decline. Anthropologists among criminologists tell us
the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. [a monster in face, a monster in soul.]
But the criminal is a décadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? - At least
the famous physiognomist's opinion which Socrates'
friends found so objectionable would not contradict this idea. A foreigner passing through
4
It is not only the admitted
dissoluteness and anarchy of his instincts which indicates décadence
in Socrates: superfetation of the logical and that barbed
malice which distinguishes him also point in that direction. And let us not forget those auditory
hallucinations which, as 'Socrates' demon', have been interpreted in a
religious sense. Everything about him is
exaggerated, buffo, caricature, everything is at the same time hidden, reserved,
subterranean. - I seek to understand out of what idiosyncrasy that Socratic
equation reason = virtue = happiness derives: that bizarrest
of equations and one which has in particular all the instincts of the older
Hellenes against it.
5
With Socrates Greek taste
undergoes a change in favour of dialectics: what is really happening when that
happens? It is above all the defeat of a
nobler taste; with dialectics the rabble gets on top. Before Socrates, the dialectical manner was
repudiated in good society: it was regarded as a form of bad manners, one was
compromised by it. Young people were
warned against it. And all such
presentation of one's reasons was regarded with mistrust. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry
their reasons exposed in this fashion.
It is indecent to display all one's goods. What has first to have itself proved is of
little value. Wherever authority is
still part of accepted usage and one does not 'give reasons' but commands, the
dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously.
- Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what was
really happening when that happened?
6
One chooses dialectics only
when one has no other expedient. One
knows that dialectics inspire mistrust, that they are
not very convincing. Nothing is easier
to expunge that the effect of a dialectician, as is proved by the experience of
every speech-making assembly. Dialectics
can be only a last-ditch weapon in the hands of those who have no other weapon
left. One must have to enforce
one's rights: otherwise one makes no use of it.
That is why the Jews were dialecticians; Reynard the Fox was a
dialectician: what? and Socrates was a dialectician
too? -
7
- Is Socrates' irony an expression
of revolt? of the ressentiment
of the rabble? does he, as one of the oppressed, enjoy
his own form of ferocity in the knife-thrust of the syllogism? does he revenge himself on the aristocrats he fascinates?
- As a dialectician one is in possession of a pitiless instrument; with its aid
one can play the tyrant; one compromised by conquering. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to
demonstrate he is not an idiot: he enrages, he at the same time makes
helpless. The dialectician devitalizes
his opponent's intellect. - What? is dialectics only a
form of revenge in the case of Socrates?
8
I have intimated the way in
which Socrates could repel: it is therefore all the more necessary to explain the
fact that he exercised fascination. - That he discovered a new kind of agon,
that he was the first fencing-master in it for the aristocratic circles
of
9
But Socrates divined even
more. He saw behind his
aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the idiosyncrasy of
his case, was already no longer exceptional.
The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself:
the old
10
If one needs to make a tyrant
of reason, as Socrates did, then there must exist
no little danger of something else playing the tyrant. Rationality was at that time divined as a saviour;
neither Socrates nor his 'invalids' were free to be rational or not, as they
wished - it was de rigueur, it was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek
thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in
peril, one had only one choice: either to perish or - be absurdly
rational.... The moralism of the Greek
philosophers from Plato downwards is pathologically conditioned: likewise their
estimation of dialectics. Reason =
virtue = happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark
desires by producing a permanent daylight - the daylight of reason. One must be prudent, clear, bright at any
cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards ...
11
I have intimated the way in
which Socrates exercised fascination: he seemed to be a physician, a
saviour. Is it necessary to go on to
point out the error which lay in his faith in 'rationality at any cost'? - It
is self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists to imagine that by
making war on décadence they therewith elude décadence themselves. This is beyond their powers: what they select
as an expedient, as a deliverance, is itself only
another expression of décadence - they alter
its expression, they do not abolish the thing itself. Socrates was a misunderstanding: the
entire morality of improvement, the Christian included, has been a
misunderstanding.... The harshest daylight, rationality at any cost, life
bright, cold, circumspect, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the
instincts, has itself been no more than a form of sickness, another form of
sickness - and by no means a way back to 'virtue', to 'health', to
happiness.... To have to combat one's instincts - that is the formula
for décadence: as long as life is ascending,
happiness and instinct are one. -
12
- Did he himself grasp that,
this shrewdest of all self-deceivers?
Did he at last say that to himself in the wisdom of his courage
for death?... Socrates wanted to die - it was
not