SOCRATES AND THE GREEK TRAGEDY

Nietzsche’s attitude toward Socrates is certainly complex and contradictory to the point of inconsistency. It is lavishly laudatory in his 1872-1874 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, yet unmistakably negative in the 1872 work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. (Both works will be discussed later in this section.) Is Socrates the last of the magnificent Pre-Socratics, or a rude intruder in the delicate artistry of the Apollonian-Dionysian integrity of the Greeks, a destroyer of the old splendid culture, ushering in an entirely new rationalist culture, which the subsequent European civilization (including the modern era) had embraced at the expense of the good old days?

Socrates and the Greek Tragedy is Nietzsche’s early take on Socrates, later reprised and expanded by him in The Birth of Tragedy. In the latter work Nietzsche cites Socrates’ malignant influence on Euripides, the murderer of Greek Tragedy, as the root cause of the degeneration of Greek art, whose consequence was the morbid condition of subsequent Western spirituality.

Thus, from the cited later work, and from this 1871 Basel lecture, an impression may come, which is in fact a very common impression, that Nietzsche was an anti-Socratic, a Socrates-hater, and such. Let that wrong impression be dispelled with my reader by the antidote of the other, already mentioned work Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, from which comes this memorable excerpt which puts Nietzsche’s attitude to Socrates in proper perspective. This is by no means the only place where I am about to quote it, but in view of its critical importance, there is no harm in repeating it again and again:

“…Every nation is put to shame, if one points out such a wonderfully idealized company of philosophers as that of the early Greek masters, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus and Socrates. All these men are integral, entire and self-contained and hewn out of one stone. Severe necessity exists between their thinking and their character. They are not bound by any convention, because at that time no professional class of philosophers and scholars existed.”

With this convincing vindication of Socrates, in Nietzsche’s perception of him, I see most fitting to end this entry.