Welcome back to the new Thinkery, our topic today, which is Nietzsche's, well, it's his short little book, Twilight of the Idols, but it's chapter two, The Problem of Socrates. But before we get to that, we'll just introduce ourselves. My name is David Barr. I'm the managing editor of the American Mind, I'm the new publication of the Claremont Institute.
I live in Washington, DC. I've been friends with Alex and Greg for decades now. And Alex, why don't you introduce yourself? Hi, yeah, I'm Alex Priu.
I teach at the University of Colorado Boulder in their Herbs program for engineering, ethics, and society. I did my graduate coursework in philosophy at Tulane. I've known these guys. I don't know if decades is right.
David, we're not that old. Well, one of us is. Yeah. Speak for yourselves.
Greg is a AARP card-carrying member. And he was at the University of Chicago in Hutchinson's president. Jesus. Sorry.
Well, I'm Greg. I'm old, apparently. Alex and David and I have been friends for a long time, and we just all have these mutual interests in, so we started this podcast. So my background is in people thought I teach at Ashland University.
I'm calling in today from central Ohio. So thanks for joining us. Thank you. So listen, Alex Priu, we talked a little bit before we start recording these episodes.
And he requested that Greg and I that this be a didactic kind of, oh, you know what, I totally blew this again. Why do you keep doing this? Yeah, whatever. My job is to always remind you.
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Hotshot. And don't feel if you want to sponsor us, if you wanted to help us out, we'll take it. But I brought up last week, the men of the new theory, the short calendar. Yeah.
Oh, my gosh. So the problem of Socrates, Alex Priu has a translation of Twilight of the Idols, which is wonderful. I know there's this. We were using the Tracy Strong translation.
Is that correct, Alex? Yeah, I think it's Polton Strong, which you're Polton Strong. Yeah, and that's a great affordable translation. Alex is hopefully one day he'll put it.
I think he did put it out, right? Didn't you for free? Yeah, it's on my website. You can just go to my academia edu page and find it there.
Maybe one day I'll get around to publishing it, but I have designs to put in a long commentary, textual commentary. It's a lot of work and I'm not sure I actually want to do all that. But if you want the translation with no notes, just notes translating foreign terms and phrases, it's free on my website. Yeah.
So Alex, Alex knows this well. He asked Greg and I to ask him a lot of questions to challenge him on anything. So look, Alex, what was it Greg? What were his exact words?
Were you guys just stay quiet and get out of my way while I did act actively late? Everything that this text is trying to teach people. Yeah, yeah. And then he alluded to his, what was that thing he would wear when he was translating the text?
That spandex, Nietzsche's soup, he called it, that had the asshole. The Superman, Louberman, Lee, it's all right. Yeah, yeah. So you guys are going to hear a lot of stuff about our personal lives as the years go by.
So that's just one little insight into Alex. But look, Alex, who was Nietzsche? Talked, I mean, set him up quickly and then this book, Situate Chapter Two. Is it Chapter Two even?
Yeah. Okay. Though I think the chapters for this book aren't numbered. They sometimes are, sometimes aren't.
So I think one of the ways, so Nietzsche's coming out at the tail end of what's referred to as German idealism. It's a trend in late, mid to late modern thought, specifically arising out of the work of Rousseau towards the end of the 18th century. Some of the major figures are Condon, Hegel, and Schiller, and all these great German thinkers. But specifically coming out of Condon who was a deep skeptic, didn't think we could know things in themselves from that skepticism came a sort of fear of nihilism, that there was no grounding to human purposes.
And Nietzsche really faced this question head on. And it's for that reason that he's usually seen as a kind of pivot from sort of the second phase of modern thoughts starting with Rousseau, and then it's a later phrase, which you think of figures like Nietzsche and Heigher and so on. So Nietzsche is a very pivotal figure. That's really the main thing to look at.
And his pivotal character is clear from the fact that he is engaged with the history of philosophy as a whole. He's writing at the end of the 19th century. He's looking back all the way to the pre-socratic. He's trying to see the extent to which philosophy is still possible, philosophy in the sense of trying to know things in themselves or understand reality as such, in light of the fact that we've grown deeply skeptical over the course of modernity.
So Nietzsche wrote not very long. He had maybe a decade and a half of actual fruitful writing from when he started publishing until he had a tragic collapse. Brought on by Alex. What was that?
What was the same thing that Greg has? Yeah, well, one of the things Greg has. Greg has to think that they cancel on the war. It was the war.
Everybody got it back to the war. That's right. Yeah. So from a syphilis-induced collapse, he went insane.
That's Nietzsche who had to collapse, by the way. Nietzsche. No, you're still in the fruitful stages of syphilis. That's right.
The bouts of creativity. Are we really going to let the system support with you in choosing me of having this? It's not an accusation, Greg. You're from a different era.
Things are different there. We don't judge people by our contemporary moral state. It was before the German theory of business. He goes, he kind of collapses.
He sees a horse being beaten on the street or something like that. He collapses. He's a true that his sister would kind of wheel him out for bockers. So this is pretty sad.
I don't want to dwell on it too much. But he collapsed and then he wrote a few letters where he's kind of insane. He was still kind of able-bodied, but he was put into an asylum where he would dance around to play piano and he would just kind of say his name over and over again. Like Dr.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Stuff like that is really odd. And then he slowly became more immobile, was wheelchair-bound. And they kept a notepad next to his hand apparently.
And in case you want to write something occasionally, he would write out conversations between his mother and his sister about how much of a burden he is. So this is a man trapped in his body. It's a very sad end to his life. Yeah.
So thanks for making me bring him that downer. Sorry, sorry. While we're on the topic of the honors, I'm sure Pope knows this, but Nietzsche is very, very famous for his atheism, right? I mean, he's a God is dead.
He's that guy, right? Yeah. Well, God is dead as a sort of transitional moment. I mean, he also looks forward to God's as well.
And he posits different kinds of gods. It's a Dionysus, the genius of the heart as a kind of God philosopher. Also the eternal return is the vicious circle of God. So it's weird.
He's atheistic in one moment of his thought. In another moment, he's playing with ideas of new gods. Is he the most misunderstood or maligned philosopher, political philosopher? Well, maybe the most misunderstood is Plato.
And maybe the most maligned is Greg McBrayer. He said philosopher. That's right. That's right.
That's the news. I was using the loose. Oh, right. Anyway, so let's take it back to the poor Greg.
Greg, you should take it back. What's the most maligned and maligned and communicable diseases? This is fantastic. Let's just keep rolling with this.
Well, I will wheel you out, Greg, to the gopters. Don't worry. Greg, you should read Nietzsche's biography as a cautionary tale, as a portant of your future. So the last work that Nietzsche wrote and sent to the publisher, but it was published actually a couple months after his collapse, was Twilight of the Idols.
And it's, I think, a remarkable little work. I think it's the best introduction to his thought, not only because it's the most developed and mature version, but also because most of the chapters, and the exception of one really long one, are just kind of short four to five, six page snippets of the most. One angle into a problem. It's the problem of Socrates, into rationality and irrationality, into morality, a one page synopsis of the whole history of philosophy, you know, critique of morality, critique of causality, education, etc.
Tons of stuff. And each one can be taken on. It's really great for teaching because you can sort of pull out a chapter, a day or a chapter a week and really go through it and they're all kind of self contained while tying together as a whole. But the most important chapter, I think, by far, is this second chapter, the problem of Socrates, where Nietzsche, I think for the first time, really returns to the figure that dominated his thinking in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and attempts to pronounce judgment on him once and for all, because the judgment in the birth of tragedy is somewhat attenuated.
I think Greg wanted to jump in. Yeah, can I jump in? I was wondering, well, first, just to comment into questions. The first comment, Alex, is that I usually, when I teach in each of the first thing I teach is the genealogy of moral.
So maybe we'll do it in episode on that at some point, but maybe you could also tell me why you think this is better than that. Second question, this is an extra question for you. I don't think that's the full title. What's the full title of this book?
It's a title of the idols or how one philosophizes with a hammer? I understand Alex pre-u philosophizes with a gazoo. Was that a set up for that awful joke? I got another one.
M.C. Hammer of the Philosophy called Denial that Touch is Possible. No, that one was worse, wasn't it? I don't even, is that a joke?
I can't, I can't, I can't tell. I can't tell. This is, I think, going to be a running thing in the show, Greg's awful jokes. Actually, the original title was the Idol on this of a psychologist, which is really, I think, interesting because how to philosophize with a hammer is very destructive.
And then the Idol on this of a psychologist is a very light sort of relaxed idol. And that's, I think, a paradox that runs through his work. On the one hand, a kind of leisure, on the other hand, a kind of indebted. And there's a, there's a, you know, a tension between these two that's reflected in various parts.
So on the genealogy morality, Greg, one of the things that I think is interesting about this section of the Palma Socrates is that he attempts to critique, and this goes to Kevin's question, actually, David. He attempts to critique Socrates from the perspective of the critique of morality and the genealogy of morality. And it doesn't work. It actually doesn't obtain for Socrates.
And if you look at the genealogy morality, Socrates is only mentioned once and then with an eye to his irony. So while the genealogy morality is a very powerful and very compelling book, and it has the most sort of accessible style because it seems to be three essays. It seems coherent. Yeah.
Yeah. It seems coherent, or it's more obviously coherent in a way that I think Tawlid Idol is one of the most perfectly written books I've read. I've enjoyed reading it and rereading it and going through it in detail. It's unbelievably subtle.
But, you know, the critique of morality doesn't seem to work for Socrates. And so I would suggest that there's a, I think this is reflected in some of the features of genealogy morality, but I think you see more directly the importance of Socrates and the significance and the difference of Socrates. And therefore, a sort of remarkable friend that Nietzsche has in the history of philosophy, one with whom he struggles, but one who I think he has deep affinities. It's the only proper name also in Twilight as a subject.
Yeah. I know that's a very good point. Yeah. And this is including, if you look at the long chapters called Raise of an Untimely Man or Four, Raise of an Untimely Man.
And there he takes aim at various figures. Yes. In funny ways, sorry. Very funny.
So he attacks them and then he sort of moves on. Somehow he's overcome them. Socrates is not so easily overcome. And I think the power of Socrates is that a similar kind of struggle where he tries to dismiss him multiple times, but ultimately has to concede that they share a deep affinity for one another.
So just a small point. Great. You're going to jump in. No, sir, just a small point.
Going back to the hammer in the subtitle, just, and then he doesn't forward describe this as a polemic of sorts. It's a great declaration of war. So there does seem to be something quite violent going on here. I don't know if that's something we'll talk about as we move on.
But let me just, I think, you know, I haven't said as much news as you have. And so I'm still stuck in the first stage of thinking he's legitimately an enemy of Socrates. So maybe you've been walking me through and persuading me otherwise. But even I'm on rereading the problem of Socrates today, even with your sort of guided suggestions, I'm still coming away with this thinking that Nietzsche is actually the great enemy of Socratic philosophy.
Or even a philosophy period towards me. Yeah. So let me lay out the structure of the work. So it's called the problem of Socrates.
Yet it begins with a critique. Really quick. Do you think it's best to lay out just a very quick structure of Twilight for the listeners? That's, I think, a little complicated.
I mean, one thing I'll say is that it begins with this critique. What's the book about just in the most general? I think it's about the possibility of philosophy, understanding that reason often constructs systems or constructs, creations, a kind of creativity that's going on in philosophy. It constructs a view of the world that's not true of the world.
And so it seems like reason is reduced to art or creativity. But is there a way in which is there a kind of creativity that can rise to a understanding of reality? Nietzsche is obviously known as a thinker of about, you know, he's one of his main subjects as aesthetics, right? Thinking about art, thinking about beauty on the one hand.
Oh, yeah. And then on the other hand, you do have the side of him in this book, especially where he talks about things like restoring the innocence of becoming, right? Not giving it a moral interpretation, but looking at reality, the flux of reality as it is in itself. So there is this emphasis on art and creativity.
But then on the other hand, there is also this focus on contemplation or insight into our reality. And so starting from this critique of reason as artistic, he's trying to come up with a kind of artistic contemplation. It's more way to put it. It's a little bit, I think, I know it's a little bit kind of perplexing and it's meant to be, I think, from Nietzsche, but I think it's important to look at that.
Sorry, I don't mean to say really. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, I think that's helpful because, you know, the first, the second chapter is called the Promo Socrates, but it begins with a critique of all the whys of the past. And then the third chapter is called reason, reason and scare quotes in philosophy.
And there it's in scare quotes because it's lately creative, right? It's actually just a kind of form of art and a very bad art at that. And so the question I sort of approached this chapter with is, well, why does he get sidelined? By Socrates.
Why doesn't the first two, why don't the first two sections of the promise? Where he's laying out this critique of philosophy of the past just lead to this critique of reason and philosophy as such. And I think the answer to that is that Socrates does not quite fit this critique. This is why the chapter, I think, is called the problem of Socrates.
Socrates poses a problem for Nietzsche's critique of philosophy. So on the one hand, and this is to go to Greg's question, on the one hand, Socrates is lumped in with the philosophers on the past. He seems to condemn life, right? To want a, an understanding of the world that redeems human suffering, like the badness of life or something like that, on the one hand.
But on the other hand, there's some part of him that sees in Socrates a kind of wisdom, right? One that's closer to Nietzsche's own view. Is that how, with your question, Greg? Yeah, it does.
I mean, I'm just still, I mean, like I said, maybe it's my lack of education on this, but I mean, he seems to be a, Nietzsche seems to me to be a philosopher who, as you just kind of laid out critiques reason critiques of life, a reasonably critiques philosophy. It disenchants the world. It robs it of its beauty. There's something wrong with the life that sort of lets reason rule as a tyrant.
And I mean, that seems to me to be a critique of Socrates. Wait, you'll persuade me maybe by the time it's over. But do you think, do you think Socrates, at least the Platonic Socrates, as you understand him, is attempting to master his passions, like to enslave them, to tyrannize them? Do you think that he makes the world beautiful?
Makes the world beautiful? Well, you're saying he just in chance, Nietzsche just in chance, as though Socrates gives you a chance. No, no, I'm sorry, Nietzsche believes that Socrates doesn't chance the world, if I'm a spoken of all this. Okay.
So, so let me lay out the structure of, so the chapter is called the problem with Socrates. Can I just one question? Really quick Alex? Please.
So I don't mean, if this derails and ignore the only other proper name really in this chapter is Plato. This is Plato's Socrates. Nietzsche understands that there were two other versions out there, right? Yeah, he, he alludes to both Aristophanes, Socrates and Plato's Socrates.
There are really subtle textual allusions to the symposium, to the clouds, to the republic. There's quite a few little places here and there that if you pick it apart, it seems to be a question based on, it seems to be primarily based on Plato's Socrates though. Okay. Okay.
Yeah. So, so it's called the pomis Socrates and that phrase is used only once in the chapter at all, specifically in section two at the end. And it's right after he's about to draw the conclusion or he is drawing the conclusion that all of the wise of the past were actually unwise. Why?
Because they condemned life as such when in fact it was their lives that were indicated that there's, they didn't recognize there's a higher standard of health where you're not in tension with the world or in tension with, with life, but you can actually live life, even with all the tuckliness, all the, you know, the awful things about it. But right when he gets to Socrates, he says, here I come back to the problem of Socrates. So the first question you ask, which, what is the problem of Socrates? Well, it seems to be that he, he can be lumped in with the wise of the past.
He seems to be unwise, you know, to make the same mistake. But on the other hand, he seems to be wise. And I'll point then to the last section 12 where Socrates says there's a wisdom to his courage, right? So it starts off by condemning him as unwise, but then finally concludes that he is wise and wise by Nietzsche's standard.
So while he attacks Socrates, Greg, you know, there is this, I think, ultimate movement toward a deep agreement with Socrates at the end. The way this unfolds, I think this is a wonderful little bit of irony in this text. First two sections lay out the problem, right? Seems to be unwise, but also seems to be wise.
Sections three through seven are a layout how Socrates seems to be unwise, how he was a kind of decadent like the rest of the wise. Such as eight through ten, then pivot to the antithesis to Nietzsche's thesis and lay out how actually no more fundamentally he was fascinating. There's something deeply attuned to the problem of the times that Nietzsche diagnoses. Nietzsche, Socrates seems to have understood that as well.
Section 11, he then ultimately sides with his thesis, resolves in favor of his thesis and introduces his own standard of what wisdom is, only in section 12 at the beginning to indicate that Socrates understood that. Now, what I think is the remarkable bit of irony here is that in a chapter where he's constantly railing against dialectics and the dialectician, he structures the work dialectically, problem, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and then a further analysis of this synthesis, breaking it down again. Again, even in the drama of the chapter, I think you see a very socratic Nietzsche. So while there is this attack on the surface, the attack is ultimately superseded.
Then that superseded of the attack is superseded, and then finally he goes back to the affinity. And so when I look at this chapter, I see a Nietzsche wrestling with Socrates struggling to put away and finally just having this deep connection to him. I guess what Nietzsche lays out in one chapter to me is so highly compressed that it could have been a book. Do you know what I mean?
It's like, why does it keep it so pithy? So that's, I think that's a good question. I mean, this is his writing style, the aphoristic style. The work, and this is in line with the point about it trying to find a sort of creative or an artistic sort of contemplation, the book ends with a comment on writing.
And there he gives a very kind of terse description of the aphorism as using the smallest number of words, the minimum of signs, and therefore creating the maximum of energy. What I think he means by that is this is that the more you explain what you mean, the more you define your terms, the more you reduce the questions, the less provocative a writing is. So the aphorism has to be tied, it has to raise questions if it's to provoke thought, right? If it's to get you to wrestle with Nietzsche.
That's again, and one way of seeing how that's so kratic is this chapter is a meditation on Socrates final words in Plato's vedom. I will rooster to a scleab is he starts off with one interpretation in section one ends up with another one at the last section, section 12. And as he wrestles with him, I think he's showing you how in a way Socrates wrote an aphorism on his last day, that was his last kind of move was a kind of artistic creation. And that's in a way Nietzsche's model for how to write and therefore how to provoke his reader into thinking.
That's interesting. Yeah. That's interesting. So in his view, Socrates in Nietzsche's understanding, Socrates couldn't have helped be who he was given the decadence of Athens.
Yeah, it seems like it, right? I mean, this was where everybody was at. And Socrates seemed to have something of a cure for the common ailment, right? This is what pivots from the sections three to seven, today, through 10 is in three to seven.
And Socrates rather looks very much unique in his decay. But then it turns out, well, he fascinated the noble Athenians, which means that the decay was common. They had some attraction to his trick as he puts it. Yeah.
Alex, you and I, we spoke about this a little while ago. And I remember, again, it was something I was wondering, someone else where I said that I think Nietzsche has Socrates a little wrong here. So you correct me where I'm wrong, that he seems to be saying that Socrates was a call. He says literally that Socrates was a symptom, but there was this decay in Athens.
And some people think that Nietzsche traced that decay to Socrates. And my argument was that Socrates actually arrives rather late to the game and that Athens is already in decay. And so he's not a cause. In fact, he's doing what he can successful or maybe not to try and remedy that decay to try and bring Athens back to health.
And that the Socratic philosophizing is trying to risk at least in part one of the Sasses trying to restore a return to ancient nobility. Maybe it's on a different plane. Maybe that's because of return to the older conception of ability is not possible anymore. Yeah.
I mean, so I do think Nietzsche is saying that this predated Socrates, right? That Socrates was a symptom of a general, yeah, a general decline. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be the case.
I tend to see his rationalism as a kind of life support system that he puts them on. What do you think he sees as the cause of that? And is it the softness? Is it the fact that Athens has become sort of an imperial power?
I mean, does he give us any indication of what's going on there? Yeah, I would say it's probably the imperialism, right? He constantly refers to decadence, right? So does he think he's living in a decadent time as well?
It seems like, yeah, I mean, Christianity for him is a kind of decay. So when he just says decadence, you should also have the word decay. We usually think of decadence as like, you know, chocolate cake or bread does on the weekend. Yeah, it's feeding me.
But Greg does in the parades. But decadence has this connection to decay, to moral decay, which for Nietzsche is also kind of physiological decay. And so I think he sees, but Nietzsche also sees in his time a great potential, right? Precisely because of this decay, that there's new opportunities available.
Speaking of the, what did you make of his comments on Socrates' looks? What was going on in that part? And he calls them ugly. He was ugly.
But he said he has the face of a criminal. Yeah, I mean, that's in section three. It was a criminal. Right.
That's true. Nobody says he has. Okay, so this is another... It's like for knowledge, it just really made me laugh.
I mean, I actually remember fans mentioned that Alex has the perfect face for podcasting related notes. I think that was you, Greg. Okay, I made the comment. You're right.
Okay. So in sections three through seven, so that's section three. Section three through seven, which are the most critical of Socrates, that in section 11. In sections three through seven, he asks numerous questions about Socrates and he does not explicitly answer them.
He talks about him being criminal. He says, was Socrates even Greek at all? Was he a typical criminal? Well, initially you want to say no, he's not Greek.
But then you go for it a little bit and it turns out, well, yeah, he was Greek. He had the same ailment that all the rest of the Greeks had. Was he an integral? No, I'm serious.
Are we bad talking about like Breyer again? Well, I mean, yes, I am. But he says ugliness is often enough the expression of inner breeding, the development thwarted by inner breeding. This is Nietzschean at the start of three.
Yeah, that's not in breeding. That means mixing of classes. Damn it. Yeah.
That's close. So with that section three, he eventually supplants. I mean, he eventually shows that, so the, you know, the phrenologist says, well, the monster in the face is a monster in the soul. But it turns out they were everybody had a monster in the soul, including the most attractive noble Athenians like Alcibiades.
Right? So that critique is meant to be supplanted, right? It's meant to be bad and then eventually to be superseded by his later inquiry. So for people who are reading this chapter, one of the, you know, my suggestions for reading is to trace the questions, see which ones he actually answers and then look for the answers later in the chapter.
So when he says it's Socrates, a typical criminal, you know, ask yourself when you read Section 12 and he, you know, Nietzsche says, well, Socrates compelled Athens to give him a mlock. Is that what the typical criminal does? It doesn't seem so. So, you know, there's little details like that you need to check against the questions he has.
Well, I'll just shoot with that. So, um, where should we go from here? Do you want to walk us through the text? I mean, I have a question, but I feel like more of a question we should ask at the answer.
So, so I'll turn this for you. So, and I have a question too. You have a question too. I feel like it seems like you just kind of jumped in, but fine.
No, no, no, no. Okay. I also have a question. Me too.
Anyway, um, so when we did a Veraways, our first episode, I think we did a really good job of explaining to the audience why we thought it was important, why so much to read this. We're spending an entire episode on one chapter of one text by Nietzsche. This isn't a question I wanted, was hoping we would say for the end, but Alex, why should listeners turn to this text? What's at stake for people?
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, we tend to think of truth, you know, when we talk about it, you know, in the casual way of the public sphere, truth as your truth, speaking your truth. Oh, this is my truth, my lived experience, right? We talk about people believing whatever makes them happy.
We sometimes think of belief systems as a way to get through life. And we have this very skeptical and almost nihilistic view of things. And this Rob's life of a lot of its beauty, a lot of its charm, a lot of its, its intrigue. It makes all thinking just sort of self-serving and that can be very empty, right?
That can feel very sort of numbing. That's what nihilism does. Well, Nietzsche really faces that straight on. He really tries to see whether there is a way in which this obvious fact, right, that we all see that people will believe things just because it makes them feel good.
Is there a way that that could be rescued from the skeptical critique, right? That all your opinions... Can you connect us to the section, man? I don't know.
Yeah, I'm working on it. Yeah. So when you look at that and you have this critique of reason as sort of willful, right, it's just making up things about the worlds. I think it's important to excavate in the history of thought to see what the roots of that are.
And for Nietzsche, who's I think the most powerful, one of the most powerful thinkers on this question, it starts with Socrates. And if it turns out that that reason is fundamentally creative and there is no way to understand reality, no standard in nature for what constitutes a good and meaningful and happy human life, then it seems like there's not much we can do. And Nietzsche faces that problem and he goes right to the source, Socrates, and he finds, while wrestling with Socrates, a kind of standard, a kind of courage to face reality, to face these questions of meaning and to find meaning in that very courage, to find a kind of redeeming human health in that courage. And so this, you know, obviously this chapter is one sliver of his investigation, but it is the most fundamental, I think, inquiry into that possibility of a kind of wisdom that can face reality.
And so I guess two questions. So Nietzsche finds in Socrates this courageous facing reality, is that right? Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So second question, is your reading of this, the problem of Socrates, is this fairly typical among Nietzsche scholars or is this somewhat widely disputed or? Well, there's, this is, you know, Nietzsche scholars are kind of a mixed bag of, of, of they wear a lot of black. Yeah.
So typically, you know, early on in Nietzsche scholars, people just assumed Nietzsche hated Socrates, then Walter Kaufmann, the great Nietzsche translator, really corrected this view and says, you know, while he does attack Socrates great, he has a deep affinity for him. And that is the general scholarly consensus. That's not, I think, something that's much of a, occasionally see very simple essays that kind of don't really acknowledge all the work on this. Where I think, I, where I think, you know, people need to pay more attention though is not simply in noticing that there's this affinity, but trying to notice the precise point, right, which comes at the end of section 11, where he says he introduces his own standard, and it attempts to dismiss doctors in the beginning of 12 shows that there is this kind of affinity.
So I don't think it's, I don't think it's at all outside the mainstream to say that there is a sort of agreement between them. I do think however that the nature of the agreement is sometimes not explored precisely enough. Okay. Can I just write a lot of some questions and you riff on them?
Yeah, sure. Uh, section eight, two Greek terms, it seems important. Uh, for Socrates dialectics was a kind of contest, Agon, Greek, and he was a great erotist, or he was a great, something related to arrows of contest and arrows or athletic competition and love. Can you speak more about the unrelated question?
Well, I mean, he's trying to find out if Socrates was typically Greek, any, any isolates, two very obvious features, right? Uh, arrows, right? So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, typically Greeks were combative, right? Yeah, competitive and, and erotic and concerned with beauty.
Oh, okay. Oh, concerned with beauty, okay, very good. And just to be, I mean, I don't know much about Nietzsche, but, so, no, Socrates was neither of those things, right? What do you mean?
A neither of those things. Yeah, I guess. What's the answer? He was not, what's that?
He was white. What about her? Well, surely a man who married a woman with those looks could be unerotic. What looks?
Socrates's wife. She was hot? No. Oh, what?
She was ugly? Yeah. How do you know this? I thought that it was commonly known.
Her name is yellow or true. Yeah. I mean, I think he was not a, I mean, I think he was not a, I mean, I think he was not a, didn't you have a tweet about horses today, Alex? And Socrates actually, in any way, it's on a different website.
The horse man. Yeah. Horseman. So, I mean, sorry, he wasn't competitive if we understand competitive to mean winning all costs.
I mean, it's actually, like you say, it's ironic, but he frequently says, look, I don't care about winning. You know, I'd rather be, I'd rather lose and be taught than, than win and be wrong. And with regard to his erotic longings, this is probably the subject for another discussion. But in my view, Socrates was not erotic.
He recognized that erotic longing was an irrational longing of the soul. So you have to, you have to again view this dialectically. So when he says he discovered a new sort of Agon, a new competition, and that he was a kind of fencing master, he's talking about how he fascinated the Greeks. He touched on their Agonal drive.
What becomes clear later is that this Agonal drive, this competitive drive is actually a kind of cure, even that turns out to be somewhat limited. But it's so though it appears like a kind of competition, it turns out to be a kind of a palliative and Socrates is not necessarily an erotic as it initially seems, but he ends up being something like a doctor, right, which is not a very erotic activity. Right? So, you know, he's unfolding and peeling back the layers of Socrates as he goes through this.
So section eight just begins from how he might have seemed to the average Athenian or to the noble Athenians. And it could be no doubt that for those who saw Socrates chasing Alcibiades or, you know, the way you see him in the Plato's dialogues that he can seem to be a kind of erotic, especially when he claims to have, you know, knowledge of nothing else. Right? When you dig deeper, of course, that's limited.
Another point, Greg, on this, you know, detail, the move from erotic to doctor reminds me a little bit of the comedies, right, where he seems to be inflamed with arrows, but then he portrays himself or is forced to betray himself as a kind of doctor for comedies. Yeah. Yeah. Do I read him right that Nietzsche is saying that Socrates was a moralist?
No, he's not saying that. He's put forward a kind of moralism. So the moralism is given the formula reason equals virtue equals happiness. That's his version of the- Section 10.
Yeah, that's the section 10. A little earlier too. But Section 10, reason equals virtue equals happiness is this- it's his version of knowledge is virtue, right? This moral rationalism or rational moralism, however you want to put it.
And in Section 11, he juxtaposes his own at the end. He says, he would portray him as a kind of moralist. He says, the most glaring daylight, reason at any price, the light bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to instincts was itself only a sickness, another sickness, and thoroughly no way back to virtue to health to happiness. So again, he's talking about reason, virtue, happiness.
To have to battle the instincts, that is the formula for decadence, right? So he says, that formula is a formula for a person in decay. So long as life ascends, happiness is equal to instinct, right? So happiness equals instinct is Nietzsche's formula.
And then Section 12 begins, did he grasp- did he even grasp still this, this clevers- this clevers of all self deceivers? Did he say this to himself in the end? So there's this kind of moralism that's put forward, and he tries to dismiss Socrates with it, but in the final section he finally comes back to see a kind of a deeper level to Socrates who understood this part of his life. So Alex, I have a question.
This problem of Socrates, you would submit that it was a serious concern for Nietzsche. Is that correct? Yeah. Right.
So this is obvious. But he doesn't expound upon the problem in a way that's as straightforward as one might wish for. Do you know what I mean? For something as pivotal and necessary to understand and explain, Nietzsche obfuscates to a degree which isn't entirely helpful.
Is that fair? Well, if it's a version of what I just said, why does he do it in this manner? Wouldn't it be the rationalist mistake to try to lay out everything clearly? If you just kind of- if you spell that every single detail, you can have this sort of dialectical playful style.
His reader would have this sense that they've understood Socrates while reproducing the problem he's just trying to fight against. By making it puzzling and by writing it so tersely, Nietzsche's trying to provoke you to thought, right, to reflect on these details. And the obvious contradiction, section to section, right, and the questions that you have in reading this. And in that very activity is provoking a kind of sort of socratic dialectics or wrestling with him just as he's wrestling with Socrates.
So I think it's of the absolute most necessity that he write it in such a style. I agree. Let's say be an example of what he's trying to get past. Right.
I agree. I think what you're touching on there is one of the adjective functions of esoteric writing. But isn't- wouldn't you agree that it's somewhat easy to misread Nietzsche here? That there's the danger that most people aren't going to read it as closely?
Yeah, he's well aware of that. Yeah, I mean, so when he talks about writing later, he says- So if you just read it in a straightforward way, write or skimmed it, let's say. Or even try to read it carefully, but you just weren't as attuned to the nuances in Alex Priu. How would you read this section?
Right. What would you come away? How would you come up- because look, Alex, at the beginning of the show, you mentioned that until Walter Kaufman came along, there was a- Oh, I thought you were making a joke. I thought you were building on the subtle innuendo that you've been developing throughout the episode.
But go on. About Greg and Syphilis? Oh, yeah, sure. That wasn't subtle.
Anyway, look, you said until recently, right, until Kaufman came along in the 60s or 50s, that people had been misreading Nietzsche for, what, 100 years? Or 75 years? No, no, no. Maybe- I mean, so you have to understand that Nietzsche was appropriated by the Nazis.
I mean, there's all political- Right, this is what I was trying to get you to- Yeah, go on. So it wasn't- I mean, it's still even today people make this false association between him and the Nazis. You know, there's certain passages in Nietzsche that raise eyebrows. Like when he talks about the Blonde Beast and stuff like that.
But I do think that there's a- there's, you know, these political circumstances often obfuscate what I think are actually doing. But about Nietzsche's style of writing, at the end of his section, what escapes the Germans, he talks a little bit about writing. He says, when cannot exclude dancing in any form from the account of their noble education? Being able to dance with feet, with concepts, with words, this is a kind of artistic contemplation, right, artistic thought.
Being able to dance with feet with concepts with words, do I still have to say that one must also be able to dance with the quill, that one must learn to write? But in this place, I would, for German readers, turn completely into a riddle. I think he understands that the noble education or the kind of education that makes people strive to, you know, think more deeply, or in Nietzsche's phrases, to overcome themselves, is necessarily riddle some. And necessarily means that he'll be understood, but that it's a risk one has to take.
In the same way that Plato writes this as well. Can I just press back on that though? Alex, I mean, look, I mentioned that in the preface he mentions that this is a, what does he call it, some kind of a declaration of war? The genealogy of morals he says is a plemic.
I mean, his tone is highly inflammatory. When nobody read Plato and thought, let's go put a regime into place based on these principles, except apparently the Ayatollah Khomeini, but so Alex was on a couple of years, he was safe. Alex is not called the Ayatollah. But, I mean, I'm certainly not trying to say that Nietzsche was not to hear anything like that.
It's certainly, I mean, he was ripe for misinterpretation, let's say, in a way that Plato wasn't or something like this, or Xenophon. Yeah, and I think you're touching on what I think is a very important, I would call it a defect in Nietzsche. I mean, I don't like to critique thinkers too quickly, but when you read, for example, the short one-page summary of the history of philosophy, one thing is very glaring, the absence of the Medevals. And I think he had a, and this is partially because of Christianity, I think, he had this kind of broad brushstrokes reading of the history of philosophy, as though nothing happened between the beginning of Christianity and Kant, as though there was, and really that this began with Plato and in a way with historical Socrates, and that no progress could have been made until now.
So if you think that we have had a 2000-year sort of darkness of philosophy, you're going to write that way. And so I think if you start looking at it a little more closely, you say, actually, no, I think there are philosophers here at the Medeval Times, or, oh, yeah, modernity seems to be the problem, not antiquity per se. I think then you start to lessen your language. So I think you're absolutely right, Greg.
This is, I think his rhetoric is motivated by part of his thought that is definitely open to critique. So two points on that. Number one, you mentioned Christianity reminded me that the part that really made me sort of stand back, sort of took me by surprise, was in Section 11 where he mentions Christianity, and seems to connect it to Socrates. But that was really strange.
But then just to circle back to the first point, Nietzsche was trying to have some kind of an effect on the world, right? Not just, he was his audience, only the point he had at academics, the philosophers, the philologist, or was he actually trying to affect political change? So sorry, that was two questions. One Christianity, and then was he actually trying to do something?
Yeah, it does seem to. I'm not sure. I mean, he talks about the great politics occasionally, and the Nazis specifically offered Boimler, a sort of Nazi-propagendist philosopher who appropriated Nietzsche's thought. He makes a big deal of this.
He also talks about the great style. I do tend to think that that's what he's pointing towards, a new kind of philosophy, a new way of thinking and writing. I don't think he thinks you'll completely leave behind the vestiges of Christianity. I think he thinks it's there to stay.
So it seems like what he's trying to do is provoke a certain group of people. When he connects Socrates to Christianity, he's talking about the moralism. The moralism of self restraint that looks at human beings as defective, that need to be human beings as needing to be approved. In some regard, and connects that simple play-inism with Christianity.
There are differences later that he draws. Oh, I see. My reading of Socrates is that he didn't think self-control was even a thing that existed. So I'd say Socrates and Christianity would be completely at odds on this.
Christianity exhorts one to self-restrains, and Socrates denies that it's even possible. Is that the way he draws? That's still a step in the antithesis. I mean, excuse me, the argument for most of the synthesis.
Yes. So when he talks about self restraint, I think, so if you go to the history of philosophy that he sketches later on, he seems to think, when it comes to Plato, it seems like the teaching is that the wise can attain this sort of moral elevation, this kind of rational virtuousness. With Christianity, it's displaced to the afterlife. It requires a kind of penance.
So I'm not sure exactly how that relates to the question of self restraint. According to Nietzsche, Socrates understood that this wasn't rational. This was actually a kind of tyranny. That it wasn't recent, tyrannizing the passions, but some other motivation or some other drive, so that it wasn't rational, self restraint, but a kind of second guessing of your instincts so that you don't act on them.
A kind of habit of questioning yourself. That doesn't come from a reason, really, because it involves a kind of fictitious understanding of the world. But it's grounded in a kind of willful need to doubt what your body tells you or what your instincts tell you to do, and therefore a kind of condemnation, irrational condemnation of life, of how you're constituted. I think that's probably a good place to stop.
Do we have any mailbag questions for the week? What was your friend's question? I think we answered it. We got some of it.
Kevin Telford asks, yeah, we answered that. It's Socrates' employment of dialectic, a former of resentment. That was necessary for the time. It was not a form of resentment.
I think that becomes pretty clear, because it was a kind of care. He had a kind of care for the Athenians of his time. It certainly was necessary for the time, though. It was a kind of pseudo-care, I think he offers.
Go on? Yeah, that's it. I think that was the only question for this week. We had some on Twitter.
Do we want to read some of these? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we have time to read a couple? Yeah, we have a few minutes.
So, so... Regialis. Which one's that? Okay, you need one and then I'll read you one.
It's from the wrestler. Yeah. Long time listener, second time listener. Long time listener.
He asks at the new thinker, Christian Warner, he's at Warner Russell's. His question for you, Alex, is why does Nietzsche make Socrates' enemy? Doesn't he at the end of BGE, that's beyond good people, suggest that he wants to prepare us for a new type of Socrates? How seriously does Nietzsche reject Socrates?
I think maybe you've already been indicating your answer along the way, but go ahead and go, Sean. Yeah, I think I mean, he sets him up as the enemy as a kind of... I mean, he's the root of this stuff, right? Is he a frenemy?
Yeah, he's a frenemy. That's not eligible. Yeah, he's a frenemy. Well, he's the root of this stuff, but he makes pretty clear that Socrates saw this as Kevin was pointing out with this question, I think, as he observes rightly, that this was just necessary for the time, but that there was a kind of deeper layer to say.
And I think Nietzsche sees himself as the sort of new Socrates, this new type of Socrates. So I don't think he seriously rejects Socrates, and he does reject a kind of decayed Socrates. Right, Greg, do you want me to ask you a question? We have a question, especially for you.
I really don't, but okay, go for it. It's actually from Chris Hoffman. Oh, longtime fan of the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the long-time fan and critic of the show, of all things, really. He wants to know Greg. Can I mention again? Can I mention again?
One of the smartest human beings I've ever met in my life. Except for the bizarre and I would say erotic fascination with watches. Watches? Yep.
He does like the watches. Erodic. Well, he doesn't want to, he doesn't have any questions about Islamic philosophy today. Thank God.
And he doesn't have or jurisprudence. And he doesn't have any questions about watches. What do I do? He's just a set up.
He's wondering if you ever got your sister another cat. Well, you just killed it and left it there. That's a good question. I didn't kill it.
That's what you said. I said it died. I said it died. Oh, we know we can read between the lions, Greg.
You were, you, you, suspiciously were silent as to the cause even when David asked. My sister is currently petless. Her dog also, she had a dog after that. I had nothing to do with this, but the dog died as well.
Yeah. Well, yeah. Sorry. Well, thank you, Chris.
We appreciate the question. I do have one small point. This is a small point clarification. I just, I was reminded when you mentioned how much Nietzsche focuses on Socrates and Plato.
I found a posthumous fragment that Nietzsche wrote. It's in the epigraph to Pangol's book on the Scratigway Blyph's and if it's memorabilia. Maybe I can read that for folks. We'll make this a question.
We can go back and edit it. Hey, did he ever talk about Zenithin? Yes, he did. Here you go.
Nietzsche says the memorabilia of Zenithin gives a really true picture that is just spiritually rich as the model for the picture. One must, however, understand how to read this book. The philologist believed it bottomed that Socrates has nothing to say to them and therefore are bored by it. Others feel that this book points you to and at the same time gives you happiness.
That seems like very high prices and high prices for Socrates. You know that reminded me, there was the question I wanted to ask you, Alex, at the outset. We'll save it for another show. Nietzsche's distinction between a psychologist, a philosopher and a philologist.
If there is a distinction, he uses these phrases seemingly interchangeably. I just don't know if that's seeming or what's going on. Yeah, I mean, philology seems to, and Greg can probably comment on this in the geology of morality. That philology was, and this is, philology is just the old term for classics and specifically the language oriented part of classics.
But philology was Nietzsche's way into understanding his critique of morality. Right, Greg? Yeah, that's right. I mean, he has some very interesting, although perhaps dubious, etymological derivations of Greek word that you caught me off the cuff here.
But some of the words related to beautiful were related to noble, and like it's us versus them and yes, it's, I remember thinking that it all didn't seem entirely persuasive. No, that seems fair, Greg, that you just understood Greek better than Nietzsche. That seems fair. It's a good note to end on.
We should clarify for the folks at home, Greg does not have syphilis. No, well, I want to thank you. You chucked if you've had syphilis, right? I'm going to go to the new thingery.
The new thingery, is that what we're called? The new thingery, yeah. The new thingery.com. Follow us at the new thingery.
Write us emails at the new thingery at gmail.com. Bye everybody. Bye bye. Greg doesn't have syphilis.