Nietzsche's "Problem of Socrates" Explained
Conclusion of Preliminaries
In this essay I’m going to give a brief, but full, commentary of Nietzsche’s The Problem of Socrates.
1. All of the philosophers have agreed: life is no good. Even Socrates, though we expect better of this first man. Agreement like this suggests that something must have been true. That was what Europeans would have thought anyway. Wide and uniform (or near uniform) agreement is the Scientific Sign. Times have changed. Trusting in that sign was naïve. The agreement might be caused by something other than knowledge. Rather than being knowers, and having that in common, the philosophers of all ages have shared something else. They have shared sickness. – Having thus separated knowledge and agreement, Nietzsche ties them back together in the last line: perhaps wisdom appears on earth like a scavenger, drawn to the sick, dying, and dead.
2. Nietzsche now explains his discovery of what he explained in the first aphorism. He is the sage who broke with the sages. He did so because he is a partisan of life and doesn’t want to be thought more than a partisan. He wants everyone to see there are no “impartial judges” in this life, only “interested parties.” The wise men who styled themselves Judges and declared against life, may not have been wise at all. Nietzsche leaves it at a question and considers the discussion of wise men a detour away from his main discussion, the problem of Socrates.
3. Socrates was low-class and ugly. Ugliness is an objection “in itself” and the Greeks hated it more than most. Socrates may not have been Greek. Of course, he was “Greek” (was born there and spoke the language) but was he really Greek? He was probably a criminal, i.e., he didn’t embody what it meant to be Greek. His inclinations were against Greece. This was discovered by a foreigner, a famous physiologist visiting Athens. This man, seeing Socrates’ ugliness, declared that Socrates was a “monster” and Socrates, to the dismay of his friends, agreed.
4. Socrates wasn’t only a criminal though. His ugliness was a sign of more than criminality. It was also a sign of his over-developed logical faculty. There is also something strange in the fact that he suffered auditory hallucinations. He called these hallucinations his “daimon” and others interpreted that religiously, but Nietzsche confuses the matter by saying that people calling it “the daimon of Socrates” thereby interpreted it religiously. Socrates is a walking contradiction: everything is exaggerated and at the same time concealed. Nietzsche doesn’t admit Socrates invited the misinterpretation of his daimon, but it is strongly suggested. After making these observations, Nietzsche blurts out his purpose here: “I seek to comprehend what idiosyncrasy begot that Socratic equation of reason, virtue, and happiness.” What was the particular root cause of this universal equation.
5. In the time of Socrates, and one is inclined to believe because of Socrates, a taste in dialectics rose up to the top, having defeated an older and apparently nobler taste. The nobler taste is a taste for authority. A man in authority does not give reasons, he gives commands. He can give commands because he knows he is indispensable. The man who gives reasons must not be indispensable. People must not feel like they have to take his word. Wherever authority still exists, the dialectician is laughed at: he is a non-entity. No one wants to be the dialectician in such times. But Socrates was both laughed at and taken seriously.
6. Dialectics is a last resort. Why? Its effect is easily forgotten. The dialectician is always hated; what he accomplishes with dialectics is immediately erased, i.e., a man says “Socrates you must obey this law” but Socrates proves otherwise. The man is shocked and realizes he is beat, but such a victory is momentary and then immediately denied. Men resort to dialectics only once they have to “enforce their own right.” It would be preferable not to need to enforce, to have that right respected without having to mount a self-defense. This is another sign that dialectics and therefore philosophy come about in times of decline. – But Socrates’ victory, the victory of dialectics in Greece and beyond, has been anything but momentary. Dialectics outlasted the decline and established something anew.
7. “As a dialectician a man has a merciless instrument to wield; he can play the tyrant with it: he compromises when he conquers with it. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he infuriates, he likewise paralyses. The dialectician cripples the intellect of his opponent.” What higher praise can be given? Nietzsche wraps it in question marks: was the development of this power in Socrates a sign that he was a bad guy, another resentful plebeian? Questions, though, are not statements and we can only wonder how Nietzsche would answer those questions. We have to ask the question: how can this description of the power of dialectics be attached to being a plebeian? Answer: Noblemen don’t need to play the tyrant. The willingness to do these kinds of things is unseemly. Socrates couldn’t magnanimously go his own way, follow his own daemon; he had to humiliate the noblemen of Athens. Nietzsche suggests this is because he had a desire for revenge.
8. So much for why Socrates “could” repel. Now for how he attracts: Socrates attracted the Greeks because they had a thirst for competitions, and he gave them a new one. Criminal and logician, these aren’t tied to the desire for competition. Nietzsche ties eros to that desire.
9. This appeal to the Greek competitive instinct was superficial. More profoundly, a general sickness was recognized by Socrates—he was the representative man of this sickness, and his way of life was likewise the cure to it. Socrates made a counter-tyrant within himself. It was mentioned earlier, in aph. 3, that a foreign physiologist had called Socrates a monster. There, Nietzsche let that accusation stand. Here we get a fuller story: Socrates did admit to being a cave of bad appetites, but he claimed that he had mastered them all. “How did Socrates become master over himself?” The emphasis here is on the paradox of “self-mastery.” Only a man that can split himself in two could master himself, i.e., there must be something to master and so all of one’s self cannot be one’s self. Nietzsche leads the reader to think maybe Socrates discovered how to do make this split but then he suggests very strongly that this split is made against our will, as a form of sickness. “no one was any longer master over himself, the instincts turned against each other.” If all of your instincts are in harmony, there is no room for self-mastery. A failure of the general harmony, of your own cave of passions, gives rise to the opportunity. Socrates saw that men were being split all around him. As a case of someone who was split, he was fascinating to others. They could tell he was split because of how ugly he was (how could someone so ugly not be at odds with himself). But he was much more fascinating as a cure—people would have merely viewed him as an oddity if they had not also the split and thereby a desire for the cure.
10. Reason doesn’t need to be a tyrant. Reason can be something else, i.e., reason could rule by reason. Tyrants don’t persuade. Reason persuades. Socrates turned reason into a tyrant, indicating an immense need. There must have been a great danger, i.e., if reason wasn’t made a tyrant something else would become a tyrant. Man isn’t necessarily tyrannized, but sometimes it becomes an inevitability, and here it becomes necessary to make reason the counter-tyrant. The counter-tyranny of reason was “their last resort.” The Greek fanaticism for reason is explained by how necessary it was to them. It is absurd looking to Europeans today (1880s), which indicates a lack of necessity (no dangerous tyranny). The great agreement found in Greek philosophy around the identification sequence reason-virtue-happiness has this pathological root. But it’s a rational pathology, i.e., a pathological anti-pathology. No: pathology is not the only thing contrary to reason! There are other things: the instincts, our unconscious, these things are not reasonable, and they can be healthy. For the Greek, though, any concession to these things led downward.
11. Nietzsche doesn’t think he should have to prove that a tyranny of reason is an error. What he does do is claim that it can never be successful; there is no escaping decadence, i.e., there is no healing the split in oneself. There isn’t going to be a return. The true equation is happiness = instinct and this equation is found where life is ascending. Whether a man or a race are ascending or descending is not a matter of choice or will, Socrates sought to make the choice possible: you are in decline or you are a mangled specimen, but you can improve, you fight against the deforming subterranean and subdue it. To have to improve—that’s a sign that you’re defective or diseased. ---- If Socrates fashioned reason into a tyrant, Nietzsche fashioned honesty into one. Nothing comforting can be permitted to slip by unnoticed. The old dichotomy, between ascending and descending life no longer holds; the men who are split, trying to heal themselves, can no longer be attempted. Everyone’s tired. We’re in a new, more terrible, stage.
12. Socrates may have comprehended the futility of his own solution. He certainly compelled Athens to give him the hemlock, i.e., he committed suicide. Ignoring the fact that he did this at a very old age, it’s possible to think he did this because he thought of life as a sickness in itself. Nietzsche is trying to kill the Socratic solution.
Concluding remarks.
Nietzsche was initiating the second solution, and therefore the third stage of man. There is healthy man whose life is in ascent, for whom there is no inner division. This man lives by instinct.
The civilization of the Greeks brought man out of that unification. I mean, European man. Surely much bad and degenerative development had already taken place to the East. – Western man is marked by the attempt to develop without becoming Persian.
Divided man is aware of himself. He’s not the “blond beast” any longer. He is interesting, but he is sick. He can have regrets and suffer frustration. He can misinterpret himself according to these and so compound his natural misery. – Socrates, the Stoics, and the Christians, when taken together, formed a tradition whereby this disunity was considered natural to man but undesirable. It was believed man’s inner division could be fixed. It could be fixed by habituation (for the majority) and wisdom (for the few—and, actually, this was the only way). Fixing it meant learning your true good by reflection and having this knowledge replace ignorant desire. For the Socratic, man is compelled by his idea of the good; once he loses his “animal condition” he’s fated to feel divided until he learns his own good. Once he does, he’s healed. Once he’s healed, he’s happy.
Nietzsche more or less denies this is possible. He identifies the Socratic man with the tradition Socrates inaugurated, namely, the Stoic tradition, whereby habituation to the good is the philosophic answer to the problem of man’s inner division. Once you have to fight your bad self, it means you have a bed self. Even a victory “over yourself” leaves its mark: you will never be “Whole.” The solution is the most unremitting honesty. You’ll never be whole, but you know you’ll never be whole, and you know what it would mean to be whole.
An honest philosopher (Nietzsche) and his set (the Philosophers of the Future) can make genuine goals because they aren’t deceived; they don’t let their own personal poverty obscure what kind of men they ought to be. Man is in this third stage, which seems like it might be the worst, but only after having reached this stage can he project the fourth.