Socrates (15 page)

[F]or the ironic formation to be perfectly developed, it is required that the subject also become conscious of his irony, feel negatively free as he passes judgment on the given actuality and enjoy this negative freedom.

(ibid.)

This condition was fulfilled by Socrates, who was the first person to exhibit irony as ‘a qualification of subjectivity’:

If irony is a qualification of subjectivity, it must exhibit itself the first time subjectivity makes its appearance in world history. Irony is,
namely, the first and most abstract qualification of subjectivity. This points to the historical turning point where subjectivity made its appearance for the first time, and with this we come to Socrates.

(281)

So Socrates’ contribution to the development of morality is consciously to reject the authority of all previous moral norms and to be aware of his freedom. The pretended objective authority of these norms is superseded by their subjective acceptance by the individual. So, irony amounts not to moral nihilism, but to moral subjectivism. The connection with irony in the normal sense seems to be twofold: first, that the pretence of ignorance by Socrates was, in Kierkegaard’s view, a tactic which he used in his destructive critique of conventional morality, and secondly, that the ironic individual no longer takes morality seriously. He cannot take conventional morality seriously because he has exploded its claims to objectivity. But he cannot take his self-adopted morality seriously either because he looks on it as a task which he has arbitrarily set himself, something perhaps like a hobby which one has just chosen to take up (235). Kierkegaard gives no indication of the answer to the question why the ironist should not simply give up morality altogether; he describes Socrates as arriving ‘at the idea of the good, the beautiful, the true only as the boundary, that is com[ing] up to ideal infinity as possibility’ (197), which seems to hint at some yet higher level in which moral subjectivism is itself superseded. A comparison earlier in the book (29) between the magnetic effect of Socrates on his acquaintances and Christ’s imparting the Holy Spirit to his disciples may point towards the later works in which this higher level is found in the leap of faith, but in this work this remains the merest suggestion.

The suggestion is developed considerably in Kierkegaard’s
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
(1846), where the traditional picture of Socrates as a forerunner of Christianity is given a characteristically idiosyncratic turn. The essence of Christianity is now seen as subjectivity. From the
objective standpoint of speculative philosophy Christianity is an absurdity, which can be embraced only by the criterionless leap of faith on the part of the individual, a leap which is not the acceptance of an abstract system of propositions, but a personal commitment to a way of life. This subjective commitment transcends objective knowledge, and is held by Kierkegaard to give access to a unique form of truth:

An objective uncertainty held fast in an approximation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth
, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual [Kierkegaard’s emphasis] . . . [T]he above definition of truth is an equivalent expression for faith. Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent on holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.

(182)
¹²

In his subjective adherence to morality Socrates came as near to this truth as was possible for a pagan:

In the principle that subjectivity, inwardness, is the truth, there is comprehended the Socratic wisdom, whose everlasting merit it was to have become aware of the essential significance of existence, of the fact that the knower is an existing individual. For this reason Socrates was in the truth by virtue of his ignorance, in the highest sense in which this was possible within paganism.

(183)

Further, Kierkegaard is prepared to attribute to Socrates not only subjective commitment to morality, but also subjective faith in God, a
faith which foreshadows indeed the faith of the Christian, while lacking its deeply paradoxical character:

When Socrates believed that there was a God, he held fast to the objective uncertainty with the whole passion of his inwardness, and it is precisely in this contradiction and in this risk, that faith is rooted. Now it is otherwise. Instead of the objective uncertainty, there is here a certainty, that objectively it is absurd; and this absurdity, held fast in the passion of inwardness, is faith. The Socratic ignorance is as a witty jest in comparison with the earnestness of facing the absurd; and the Socratic existential inwardness is as Greek light-mindedness in comparison with the grave strenuosity of faith.

(188)

So Socrates combines subjective conviction in the existence of God with the view that objectively the truth of the matter is uncertain. To the extent that that position involves some intellectual discomfort it is a mere approximation to the genuine anguish of the Christian, whose commitment is to truths concerning which it is objectively certain that they are absurd.

For Nietzsche, Socrates was one of a number of figures, including also Christ and Wagner, for whom he had profoundly ambivalent feelings: as he said, ‘Socrates is so close to me that I am nearly always fighting him.’ This ambivalence finds expression in differences of tone, sometimes between different works, sometimes in the same work. His presentation of Socrates in his first published work,
The Birth of Tragedy
(1872), illustrates this. The central thesis of this work is that Greek tragedy arose from the interaction of two opposed aspects of the creativity of the Greeks, which Nietzsche terms the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian tendency, which has its purest expression in Homer, is characterized rather obscurely via an analogy with dreaming; it seems to amount to the presentation of an imaginary world, specifically the world of the Homeric gods, in a lucid and delightful
form. The Dionysian tendency, whose analogue is intoxication, is the tendency to give expression to ecstatic and excitable impulses, especially sexual impulses and impulses to violence. Religious festivals were the traditional occasions on which these impulses were allowed expression, and it was the unique achievement of the Greeks to develop a form of festival, the dramatic festival, in which the marriage of these two tendencies gave rise to an art form, tragedy, which combines Apollonian illusion and Dionysian excitement in a unique synthesis. The Apollonian element is associated particularly with the episodes of dialogue in Attic tragedy, and the Dionysian with the chorus, but we must not think of the synthesis as simple juxtaposition. Rather (though the obscurity of Nietzsche’s writing renders interpretation hazardous), the basic idea is that the world of tragedy is at once as dark and terrible as the Dionysian forces and as lucid and, in a mysterious way, joyful as the sunlit world of the Homeric gods. ‘So extraordinary is the power of the epic-Apollonian that before our eyes it transforms the most terrible things by the joy in mere appearance and in redemption through mere appearance’ (12).
¹³

This synthesis, achieved in the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, disappears in the work of Euripides; Euripidean tragedy is a degenerate form, whose distinctive feature is a realistic depiction of character, closer to the world of New Comedy than to the terrifying yet ideal world of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Nietzsche’s term for this is that Euripides

brought the spectator onto the stage . . . Through him the everyday man forced his way from the spectators’ seats onto the stage; the mirror in which formerly only grand and bold traits were represented now showed the painful fidelity that conscientiously reproduces even the botched outlines of nature.

(11)

It is this which brings Socrates onto the scene, since Nietzsche, echoing
in his idiosyncratic fashion the ancient tradition that Socrates had collaborated with Euripides (DL, 2.18), sees him as a decisive influence in the degeneration of tragedy which he saw Euripides as having effected.

Once again, the precise form of this influence is not easy to recover from Nietzsche’s prose. He speaks of Euripides as being only a mask through which speaks a new demonic power, neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but Socrates (
Birth of Tragedy
12). The literal meaning hinted at appears to be this, that Euripidean realism is founded on psychological naturalism. Dramatic characters have to be shown acting on the same psychological principles which we use to explain the actions of actual people in everyday life. This is what Nietzsche calls ‘
aesthetic Socratism
[author’s emphasis], whose supreme law reads roughly as follows “To be beautiful is to be intelligible” as the counterpart of the Socratic dictum “Knowledge is virtue”’ (11). So ‘Socratism’ seems to be the name for a spirit of naturalistic rationalism, which seeks to tame the terrible forces so gloriously exhibited in Aeschylus and Sophocles by subjecting them to elucidation and criticism.

Socratism condemns existing art as well as existing ethics. Wherever Socratism turns its searching eyes it sees lack of insight and the power of illusion; and from this lack it infers the essential perversity and reprehensibility of what exists. Basing himself on this point, Socrates conceives it to be his duty to correct existence: all alone, with an expression of irreverence and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether different culture, art and morality, he enters a world, to touch whose very hem would give us the greatest happiness.

(13)

Aesthetic Socratism seems thus to be the extension to the realm of art of the intellectualism which the Platonic Socrates seeks to apply to conduct. For the Platonic Socrates virtue is knowledge and is sufficient for
eudaimonia; so
the good life is to be achieved through
understanding, and all wrongdoing is to be attributed to lack of understanding. Just as the Platonic Socrates gives no positive role to the non-rational elements in the personality, so Socratic art has no room for the mysterious, for what cannot be captured by theory. But it is precisely its resistance to theory which gives tragedy its power and profundity. It explores forces which transcend psychological understanding, and it exhibits dilemmas which it is beyond the power of moral theory to resolve. Socratism thus represents a profound impoverishment of the spirit, which Nietzsche calls (using the French term)
décadence
.

The use of this term brings out the ambivalence in Nietzsche’s attitude to Socrates.
The Birth of Tragedy
is pervaded by a sense both of the superhuman quality of the individual person Socrates, ‘the human being whom knowledge and reasons have liberated from the fear of death’ (15), and of the transcending power of the spirit of enquiry which that person represents. The ‘pleasure of Socratic insight’ transforms one’s whole attitude to the world:

the Platonic Socrates will appear as the teacher of an altogether new form of ‘Greek cheerfulness’ and blissful affirmation of existence that seeks to discharge itself in actions-most often in maieutic and educational influences on noble youths, with a view to eventually producing a genius.

(ibid.)

[W]e cannot
fail
to see in Socrates the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history

(ibid.)

since Socrates is the incarnation of the scientific spirit, which has led to the heights of modern scientific achievement, and without which humanity might not even have survived. But at the same time Nietzsche is convinced that this sense of Socratic optimism, this faith in
the power of the intellect to solve all problems of conduct and of nature, is not only a profound delusion, but also a symptom of degeneration. Later sections of
The Birth of Tragedy
express this strongly:

From this intrinsically degenerate music [
namely, the New Attic Dithyramb, a musical form developed in the late fifth century
BC
] the genuinely musical natures turned away with the same repugnance that they felt for the art-destroying tendency of Socrates. The unerring instinct of Aristophanes was surely right when it included Socrates himself, the tragedy of Euripides, and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets in the same feeling of hatred, recognizing in all three phenomena the signs of a degenerate culture.

(17)

One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence.

(18)

Later in the same section he speaks of the modern world as entangled in the net of Alexandrian (i.e. uncreative and scholastic) culture, proposing as its ideal the theoretical man labouring in the service of science, whose archetype is Socrates, and of the fruit of Socratic culture as ‘optimism, with its delusion of limitless power’. The ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ added to the second edition of the work fourteen years later returns to this theme: ‘[Tlhat of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality and cheerfulness of the theoretical man . . . might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts?’ (1).

In later writings, particularly those written in 1888, shortly before his final mental collapse, the tone is harsher. Nietzsche now identifies himself with the Dionysian forces, and sees Socrates’ rejection of them as in effect a personal rejection, to which he responds with extreme
emotional violence. In the section of
Ecce Homo
devoted to
The Birth of Tragedy
he says that that work’s two decisive novelties are first, the understanding of the Dionysian phenomenon, now seen as ‘the sole root of the whole of Hellenic art’, and secondly, ‘the understanding of Socratism: Socrates for the first time recognized as an agent of Hellenic disintegration, as a typical
décadent
’. ‘I was the first to see’, he continues,