Nietzsche vs the Tyrant called Reason
or, The Redemption of Socrates
This is a piece I wrote for a philosophy seminar in university. I’ve moved past this perspective, but nostalgia invited me to share it here. Apart from removing some commas, the only change I’ve made to the original is adding a few headings.
Prologue
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche engages in heresy, knocking down one of the idols of philosophy; Socrates is rendered as a tragic character, who, in pursuit of wisdom, undermines the wisdom of others and takes from them what few metaphysical comforts they cling to. The Socrates shown by Nietzsche is more caricature than character, and might be more informed by classical and scholastic interpretations of Plato’s dialogues, than by the context of Socrates himself and the influences on Plato. Socrates is a pole star for the discipline of philosophy, serving as a reference for navigating the treacherous and turbid seas of thought. He is often lionized for championing reason, promoting inquiry, and equating Truth with the Good and the Beautiful; Socrates is as much a hero as a standard of measurement. Philosophers who venerate Socrates may depend on the myth of the man, taking comfort in his valuation of and methods to discover truth, in order to chart a course of inquiry. The character of Socrates in Plato’s works has become an ideal for the reasonable mind, promising to remove mystery, making him a target for those who would preserve it. When Nietzsche declares his apostasy and tips the stalwart Greek off his plinth, the fervent Socratic acolyte retreats further into the myth, grasping a representation of Socrates that may not resemble the man at all. Truth is the god of the rational religion, and Socrates is first among prophets. As with any religion, the divine is a source of mystery to mortals, and by worshipping Truth, the supplicant places truth into the mysteries. Truth need not be awesome, and Socrates need not proselytize for it. I will attempt to redeem Socrates from the worst of Nietzsche’s criticism, but the reader will have to endure further blasphemy; I will present Socrates not as a champion of reason, but a critic, who sought to preserve mysteries as Hesiod and Parmenides did.
Making Socrates into a critic of reason is a provocative position, but my intent is to restore him to the mortal domain. The mythical Socrates is an unreachable ideal, and his character is such that Alcibiades, in Plato’s Symposium, regards Socrates and his thinking so strange that he should be compared with, “...Silenus and the satyrs” (221d). Alcibiades, liberated by wine, forgets himself enough to honor his teacher with an honest, though discordant, compliment. Silenus was tutor to Dionysus, a drunken mystagogue, where as Socrates is immune to drink (Symposium, 214a), and finds the chief mystery as being alive, which he chooses to embrace the end of so as to achieve wisdom (Phaedo, 66d-67a). Nietzsche refers to Socrates as the, “mystagogue of science” (BoT, 96), which points again to Silenus. Though the ends may differ, Socrates is following the advice of Silenus to King Midas, that it is best to have not been born and better to die soon than to suffer on; advice which is echoed by the old citizens of Colonus to Oedipus (Sophocles, 1389-1391). Socrates’ character is so odd and contradictory that a full examination risks turning him into a human being, banishing him to the mortal realm on a more permanent basis than Apollo’s time as a slave to Admetus (Apollodorus, 3.122). I prefer to approach the character of Socrates as a human being who lives under the same conditions of experience as the rest of us, and who desires wisdom that enables humanity to lead good lives in spite of adversity or pathos. In order to reveal the route to this perspective on Socrates, I oblige myself to induct the reader into the mysteries of my thinking.
The Ruler
As some philosophers are wont to measure others by Socrates, I measured Nietzsche by Kant. The comparison has some justification: Nietzsche’s perspectival stance is heavily indebted to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. As The Birth of Tragedy unfolds and Nietzsche portrays the agon between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the entrance of the antagonists, Socrates and the Theoretical Man, suggested to me an analogy between these tragic masks and Kant’s faculties of thought. Kant names and describes the machinery of thinking as sensibility (CPR, A19/B33), intuition (A19/B33), imagination (A78/B103), understanding (A68/B93), and reason (A131/B170). This is not an exacting account of the faculties of thought, but it does form a simple reference, with concrete and contingent immediacy at one end, and abstract and necessary mediacy at the other. I’ve found my Kant-ruler easier to wield than the Analogy of the Divided Line (Republic, 509d-511e). The analogy between Nietzsche’s tragic masks and Kant’s faculties is as follows: Dionysian with sensibility, Apollonian with imagination, Socrates with understanding, and the Theoretical Man with reason. Intuition goes unpaired for the moment, until I explain the associations. The Dionysian is connected to brute sensibility, which goes unstructured by the intuition because it occurs outside of the individual perspective, and which Nietzsche likens to intoxication, eliminating self-reference (BoT, 36). The Apollonian matches well with the imagination, which is the ground of synthesis and the origin of apperception; Apollonian individuals construct a self in order to have fixed references so that experience can be judged and understood. Nietzsche assigns the principium individuationis to the Apollonian (BoT, 36). I separate Socrates from the Theoretical Man because Socrates wants to make appropriate and well-founded judgments which permit a good life. From Kant’s Table of Judgements, Socrates operates by assertion, being in the world and confronted with stubborn facts which he strives to understand (CPR, A70/B95). The Theoretical Man is a creature of apodeiction and is the embodiment of reason, which, in its attempts to discover the principles that govern appearance, is frustrated by the limits of individual experience. Hume says in his Treatise that, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (T 2.3.3.4, SBN 415); when reason is given rule of the mind, it will go beyond the limits of experience and dictate principles to the understanding, rather than discover them. Reason is a would-be tyrant, and requires a vigilant spirit to control; the tyrant of Plato’s Republic resembles unchecked reason (579a-580a). Nietzsche’s Theoretical Man (BoT, 94) may be Socrates’ daimonion (BoT, 88). Kant warns his readers that logic, when operating as an organon of judgement rather than a canon, becomes dialectic, and generates illusion (CPR A60-61/B85). Given control of the faculties of understanding and imagination, reason can be quite poetic, and the principles and concepts that follow from this reasonable poiesis are often at odds with empirical intuitions and judgments. If reason is allowed dictatorship, it may overrule the empirical, potentially inhibiting instinctive action. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates testifies that, “a sort of voice comes, which, whenever it does come, always holds me back from whatever I’m about to do but never urges me forward” (Apology, 31d). This “driving-wheel” of logic (BoT, 89) is, permitting an adjustment to Nietzsche’s metaphor, in pursuit of Socrates; he may avoid the course of instinct by remaining in the shadow of the looming wheel of logic. My unorthodox analogy between the tragic masks and faculties of thought is nearly complete, but intuition wants a partner. None of the characters in The Birth of Tragedy seemed appropriate. Neither Aeschylus nor Archilochus fit the role. Heraclitus could have fulfilled the Dionysian or Theoretical Man, but he is too mercurial for my taste, and both were already cast. The mythical Socrates calls for a formidable opponent, so I drew from outside of Nietzsche’s writing. I granted the honor of playing intuition, and thus the problematic, to Parmenides.
Intuition and Dreams
Parmenides has suffered, in my opinion, from scholarly comparison with the mythical Socrates, but this is only an instinct rather than the product of research and inferences. After first reading the fragments of Parmenides’ poem, On Nature, I was gobsmacked by the interpretations: Parmenides is given as endorsing a strict monism, as a dogmatic logician, as a singularly gifted semantic technician, and as granting reality to the intelligible over the sensible. These perspectives on Parmenides, while interesting, sounded bizarre to me. I approached the poem from naiveté and judged it to be a criticism of reason. Fragment 8 of the poem captured this notion for me; McKirahan’s translation follows: “Being is ungenerated and imperishable, entire, unique, unmoved and perfect; it never was nor will be, since it is now altogether, one, indivisible. For what parentage of it will you look for?” (Fr. 8.3-6 / Coxon, 64-65). I read this as the product of repeated categorical abstraction, leaving particulars behind, then generals and qualities, until nothing was left but this most basic, universal category. To me, it seemed that Parmenides displayed what reason was capable of if allowed to run free: complete stupefaction. I was immediately reminded of Kant, who advised that, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (CPR, A51/B75). Redeeming Socrates from Nietzsche’s indictments gave me the opportunity to put my speculation about Parmenides to use.
On Nature begins in a fabulous setting, with the unnamed young man of the tale leaving the house of Night, or Nyx (Fr. 1.10, Coxon, 48). Nyx is one of the five primordial beings, according to Hesiod (Theogony, 116-123), a child of Kaos by no father, and the mother of Aether (Light) and Hemera (Day), who are both featured indirectly in the first fragment. Nyx is also the mother of some less glorious children, whom one might interpret as sources of suffering, to include Moros (Doom), the Oneiroi (Dream & Nightmares), Oizys (Misery), the Moirai (Fates), Nemesis (Righteous Indignation), Geras (Old Age), and Eris (Strife), to name a few (Theogony, 211-225). There are other benevolent and magnanimous divinities that Hesiod attributes to Nyx, but her malevolent children call the beginning of On Nature into question; why does the young man start out at the house of Night? Interpreting the Proem as a journey from the darkness of superstition into the light of reason is a trifling approach and suggests a view of it through the mythical Socrates. Nyx is also the mother of Apate (Deception), and the potential deception in the Proem is crucial to interpreting the rest (Theogony, 224). Consider, from the moment the young man arrives at the house of Night, by whatever means this occurred, that he was under the ministrations of Night and her progeny, and may have been deceived from the beginning. In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope recounts a dream to Odysseus about her would-be suitors, explaining that the truthfulness of dreams depends on which gate the Oneiroi travel through:
Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams, one is made of ivory, the other made of horn. Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved are will-o’-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit. The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them. (Homer, Odyssey, 19.633-638)
Even if Homer isn’t authoritative on the gates of the Oneiroi, it is likely Parmenides would have been familiar with Homer’s epics and might have made use of the dream gates in On Nature. The young man finds the gates, supposedly between day and night, are guarded by retributive justice, in McKirahan’s translation (Fr. 1.14, Coxon, 50), or by avenging justice in Curd’s translation (Fr. 1.14, Curd, 57). The spirit of fair justice, Dike, only comes along after the Titanomachy (Theogony, 907), but Nemesis is a much older spirit, and easier to place in Nyx’s domain. The Greek for Nemesis, Νεμεσις (Liddell, 1157), is not found in the Proem of On Nature, but if the young man of the poem is deceived from the outset, then he may have mistaken Nemesis for Dike, and the daughters of the Sun might instead be the Oneiroi, guiding him into a dreamscape. When the young man is finally presented to the goddess, she purports to explain all of, “persuasive truth” (Fr. 1.29, Curd, 57), or, “persuasive reality” (Fr 1.29, Coxon, 54). The pivotal word, translated as “truth” or “reality”, is ἀληθείης or Alitheia, which sounds strikingly similar to Lethe, λήθη. Lethe is the spirit of forgetfulness, oblivion, and concealment; she is daughter to Eris (Strife), and granddaughter to Night (Theogony, 225-228). The prefix letter alpha, attached to Lethe (λήθη) becomes Alethe (αλήθή, ἀληθής), and though Alitheia and Alethe are often translated into English as “truth” and “true” respectively, the alpha prefix indicates a negation, so a primitive translation would yield “not-forgetfulness” or “unconcealment”. The LSJ translation agrees with my fumbling through ancient Greek, rendering ἀληθής in English as “unconcealed”, “true”, and “real” (Liddell, 63-64). I find a more satisfying negation of forgetfulness to be, recollection, which returns me to Socrates for a moment.
Eyes of the Gods
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates tries to answer Meno’s question, if virtue is acquired by teaching, practice, or some other way (Meno, 70a), and in his geometry demonstration with the slave-boy, puts forth that having access to knowledge that has not been taught is recollection (85d). Pair recollection with Socrates’ position that humans sin only from ignorance (Protagoras, 358b-d), and the optimism Nietzsche complains of becomes evident (BoT, 97). Socrates is accused of deviating from Greek pessimism, the acceptance of suffering, by proposing a way to escape it. Returning to English translations of Lethe (λήθη) and its negations, forgetfulness and illusion are sources of suffering, which can be remedied by recollection and unconcealment. This may seem little different from Socrates’ words in Meno and Protagoras, but I am looking at Socrates through my interpretation of Parmenides, and have jettisoned that ugly English word, truth. Socrates still embodies the understanding, but feels deceived by the intuition, and is goaded by reason to disregard intuition in favor of the eidophusikon, or formal image of nature, generated from principles. Parmenides, in my view, recognizes the threat of reason which, if given reign, would manufacture something called Truth after failing to divine the mysteries; he couched his warnings as apagogic arguments which illustrate what reason will agree to and intuition will reject. In this way, the illusion and forgetfulness of Lethe is a source of suffering, but it includes the deception by reason as well as deception of the senses. I have Parmenides represent intuition because the young man of On Nature has been to the divine realm and returned with at least some coherent account; he structured the experience as best he could so that he might have some understanding. Forgetfulness and illusion seem suitable candidates as sources for suffering, but, if they are, Parmenides might have chosen a direct approach and simply told us so. There is a tradition among the Greek poets, in Hesiod for example, and likely the Greeks in general, for humility when speaking of the gods, an avoidance of hybris.
Hesiod opens his Theogony by praising the Muses, who gave him the account of the divinities and their doings. He reminds his readers and listeners that his account is inspired by the Muses, but his tale should not be taken without condition. Hesiod quotes the Muses: “We know how to tell many believable lies, but also, when we want to, how to speak the plain truth” (Theogony, 28-29). This is both an avoidance of hybris and a caveat; Hesiod has gathered and condensed many of the Greek muthoi into a fairly coherent, if occasionally contradictory account. It is a case of epistemic modesty; whatever editorial license Hesiod may have taken with the individual stories, he did not create them, but chose to present them in a system, and so preserve his understanding of them. Hesiod announces his modesty directly, but Parmenides, if he is practicing modesty in On Nature, has enciphered it. The anonymous young man and goddess may indicate Parmenides’ modesty and strengthen the notion that the whole account may be deceptive; anonymous, or ἀνώνῠμος, can mean “nameless”, but also can mean “forgotten name” (Liddell, 170). He does not identify them as nameless; he simply omits the names, leaving his audience to fill in the anonymity, and perhaps discover that the names have been forgotten. If Parmenides is being purposefully deceptive, it seems appropriate on grounds of modesty and avoiding hybris, as well as driving the point of the illusions of reason. Parmenides offers a human source of suffering in self-deception, which differs from the traditionally divine sources. If Hesiod is a reliable source, then, in his age, the primary source of human suffering can be attributed to one troublesome Titan, Prometheus.
Judgment of the Gods
Nietzsche leans heavily on Aeschylus’ version of Prometheus, who is claimed to have a dual Apollonian and Dionysian nature (BoT, 72). The Zeus found in Prometheus Bound is wildly inconsistent with the Zeus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, so much so that both hardly seem to be written by the same poet. In Agamemnon, Zeus is wise, fair, and merits veneration; the Zeus of Prometheus Bound is simply another Ouranian tyrant, acting against a prophecy dictated by Prometheus, that he will be overthrown by a son. This seems nothing more than an alteration to the muthoi of Kronos overthrowing Ouranos, fulfilling Gaia’s prophecy, which ended in Ouranos’ castration to prevent any further Ouranian progeny (Theogony, 165-187). Zeus repeats the act against Kronos, fulfilling another of Gaia’s prophecies (463-471). Kronos is castrated, just as Ouranos, to prevent further Kronian progeny. Gaia and Ouranos had their own prophecy for Zeus, that he would be overthrown by a son from Metis (Cunning), after she birthed Tritogenia. Zeus followed the patterns of his forebears, but instead of eating the children of Metis, he simply ate her before she was able to give birth (891-905). In a way, the prophecy is fulfilled when Zeus births Athena from his head (929-931); Zeus in effect gives birth to law, which supplants his rule, and Zeus respects Athena, preventing another war among the gods and bringing some measure of order to the cosmos beyond the population of natural forces. An example of Zeus’ honor for law embodied is in the death of Asclepius and the banishment of Apollo. According to Pindar, Asclepius sought to raise a life from Hades’ domain, violating divine law (Pindar, Py 3.55-57). Zeus smote Asclepius with a thunderbolt for the crime, but this angered Apollo, the father of Asclepius, who killed the Kyklopes in return (Evelyn-White, 189-191). The Kyklopes gave Zeus the thunderbolt to aid in overthrowing Kronos, and Apollo denied it to anyone else after slaying them. Zeus would have cast Apollo into Tartarus, were it not for the intercession of Apollo’s mother, Leto. Zeus banished Apollo to the mortal realm instead, where he served as a slave to Admetus, gaining his own respect for the laws applied to mortals and divinities alike (Evelyn-White, 213). The law-giving and orderly Zeus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is not consistent with the vengeful bastard son of Kronos in Prometheus Bound. I elect to disregard Prometheus Bound, because Aeschylus’ accounts of Zeus are inconsistent with his other works, but also because his accounts of Prometheus are inconsistent with many other poets, Hesiod in particular. One phrase from Agamemnon links to Hesiod quite well: “Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth” (Agamemnon, 177-179). This is the pathei mathos, learning through suffering, and Hesiod places much of the blame for this suffering at the feet of Prometheus.
After recording his parents as Iapetos and Klymene, Hesiod recounts how Zeus had Prometheus chained, to be tormented daily by a great eagle. Only with Zeus’ blessing does Herakles slay the eagle and free Prometheus, but Hesiod’s ordering in the Theogony should not be taken as a temporal sequence (Theogony, 523-536). Prometheus is a trickster, and every boon he bestows on humanity carries a brutal cost. Nietzsche may regard him as, “the great lover of mankind”, but Hesiod shows the price humanity pays for disrupting Zeus’ order. At Mekone, Zeus was brokering a new arrangement between mortals and the gods; mortals were to keep an aesthetic distance from the gods, and would honor the gods with sacrifices (Eliade, 255-257). Prometheus tampers with the first sacrifice, hiding the choicest parts of the ox underneath its stomach and disguising the bones of the ox under gleaming fat (Theogony 537-560). This established a tradition of sacrificing the bones to the gods and keeping the good meat to consume. Zeus’ response was to deny fire to mortals, keeping a mystery from them, and complicating their consumption of meat. As if Prometheus had not done enough damage, he elects to grant the mystery of fire to mortals, which allow meat to be cleansed, but the toll was severe (563-572). To punish humanity for all eternity for accepting the mystery of fire, Zeus ordered Hephaistos to fashion the first mortal woman, Pandora (572-620). At the end of this tale, Prometheus is in chains, which should prevent him from causing further trouble for mortals or the gods, just as Zeus banished or subjugated other Titans. Hesiod’s account of Pandora and the jar provides another clue to the account of suffering. In his Works and Days, Pandora opens the jar, which I speculate had been in the care of Epimetheus to keep closed, and once opened the miseries that plague humanity pour out, but Pandora traps Hope in the jar, sealing it (WD, 115-119). Keeping Hope from mortals seems a worse punishment than all the miseries that escaped, but the Greek word used in the poem is ἐλπίς, which can be translated as both “hope” and “expectation” (Liddell, 537). Miseries loose in the world are bad enough, but having expectation accompany them is far worse. Expectation of misery can manifest as pessimism, or anticipatory fear, especially the fear of the individual who in separating themselves from others, also forgets their suffering. I will return to this expectation of suffering, after presenting one more account of human suffering from Hesiod.
Judgment of Man
Five ages of man are given in Hesiod’s Works and Days. In brief, they are the Golden, who lived like gods and now pass among mortals as benevolent spirits (WD, 129-147); the Silver, immature and dim-witted, they became spirits beneath the earth (148-163); the Bronze, violent brutes, consigned to Hades (164-178); the Heroes, beautiful and tragic, who now reside with Kronos in the Isle of the Blest (179-197); and the Iron, the age of misery and strife, Hesiod’s time (198-245). In the Five Ages, Hesiod makes no mention of Prometheus and his chicanery, of the pathei mathos laid down by Zeus, or of any divinities responsible for suffering. In the age of Iron, men turn against one another, neglecting the bonds that once gathered each individual into a whole. In the spirit of Hesiod’s Five Ages, Socrates imports the muthos into Plato’s Republic, becoming the Myth of the Metals (Republic, 415a-c); the intent of the myth in the Republic is to bind the citizens of a theoretical city together, so that they do not end up like the miserable peoples of Hesiod’s Iron Age. The Age of Heroes is not transported into the Myth of the Metals, possibly because heroes have a habit of battling the gods and calling down ruin; heroes might disrupt Socrates’ social order. Rather than dismissing muthoi, Socrates embraces them, and is even willing to enshrine them as the basis for his polis. He honors the wisdom of Hesiod, Homer, Pindar, and others, despite stacking rational principles atop the muthoi, because he seems to respect the limit of reason. Socrates does rationalize the use of the Myth of the Metals, but he does not employ reason to manufacture some eidophusikon in its place. His muthos is not a rational principle or the product of deduction; it is a poetic act of the imagination.
Myth is not subject to the truth standards of logic, it need only be true enough to agree with the intuition and understanding. Logical truth is truth fully “unconcealed”, where the mythical truth might be no more than a glimpse behind the veil of illusion. Conflicting myths can coexist, so long as their little truths do not deviate greatly. Hesiod’s muthoi of the Five Ages of Man and his tale of Prometheus give two entirely different sources of pathos, but both can be accepted because they do not negate one another or countermand experience. A purely rational system that is constructed to account for the world, an eidophusikon, will collapse if any of its fundamental principles are upset, but a system founded on myth can retain the myth even if principles built atop it crumble. Myths are wisdom, even in fabulous figurations. They transmit a conditional knowledge, often paid for by suffering under the limits of possible experience. The little truths of the muthoi are subjective. Wisdom is conditional knowledge, in the absence of the divine, objective Truth. When Socrates claims to know nothing (Plato, Apology, 21d), he is not merely being modest, he is admitting his inability to access divine Truth; anyone claiming access to divine Truth is overtly blasphemous. The ecstasies of the Delphic Oracle and the Dionysian Mysteries are all disembodied experiences and can hardly be called experiences without the individual subject of reference. Socrates seeks the little truths of wisdom because he cannot have knowledge of objective truth in any meaningful way. The truths that reason discovers from our phusikons, our images or representations of nature, are grounded truths. When reason is allowed to disregard empirical intuitions and concepts, to dismiss the phusikon, the resulting image is formally true but void of empirical content; reason desires to generate a holophusikon, a whole image of nature, but creates an eidophusikon instead, and mistakes this act of poiesis as noetic. If truth is not grounded in experience, but only needs to agree with reason, then the Theoretical Man need not wrestle with Truth on the ground, but instead hoist Truth in the air, as Herakles with Antaeus (Apollodorus, 2.114-115). Removed from its ground, truth loses all potency. There is one last tale of truth which might give an identity to the Theoretical Man.
Aesop recorded a tale in his Fables that recounts the origins of Truth. Prometheus is named as a potter, who also gave shape to the peoples of Aesop’s age (Aesop 530). Trickery is apprentice to Prometheus in this telling, instead of a characteristic of him. Prometheus desires to craft a statue of Truth in order to regulate human behavior but is called away by Zeus. Trickery creates a statue nearly identical to truth, save for the feet, and it is called Falsehood. When Prometheus returns, he finds both Truth and Falsehood beautiful, but only Truth is able to move. This fable is only found in Latin fragments, so its origins with the Greek Aesop are suspect, but the fable itself is alarming. Trickery is separate from Prometheus, shifting the blame for the creation of Falsehood. Prometheus is named as a potter, eliciting suspicions about Pandora’s Jar. Most fearful of all however, is that Prometheus set out to manufacture Truth, as if it did not exist without him. His truth moves, and being his creation, it might go where he wills it. Prometheus reveals himself to me as the Theoretical Man, the embodiment of reason, who seems immune to the effects of his inscrutable principles on the world and the people in it. Dionysus now has a proper opponent, and perhaps there are enough players on the stage to redeem Socrates from Nietzsche’s criticism and from apotheosis.
Eyes of Man
Mysteries abound, and many of the sources of suffering are among the mysteries. If suffering is given by the gods, there is no means for a mortal to avoid it. If suffering is a product of ignorance, then a total understanding can master suffering, but in the absence of total understanding, the individual will protect themselves and behave cautiously, if not with fear. The Apollonian perspective accepts some sources of suffering as incomprehensible, and other sources as comprehensible by degrees, allowing the individual to expect suffering and mitigate, avoid, or possibly learn from it by the law of pathei mathos. The Apollonian who is able to share perspectives with other individuals broadens understanding, ameliorating greater suffering or learning from it together. The Dionysian tears down individual perspectives, allowing all who participate to recognize common suffering without the necessity of comprehension. Socrates, seeking wisdom to alleviate suffering, seems to search the riddles of reason for respite, when he is viewed through the lens of the mythical Socrates, Champion of Reason. The reader who carries in the prejudice that Socrates will employ logic to dispel superstition and illuminate his audience with ethical truths, finds a Socrates in the dialogues who is clearly unethical, as Nietzsche points out (BoT, 18). The dialogue between Socrates and Antyus in Plato’s Meno is a good case to view Socrates through the mythical Socrates (90a-95a).
Anytus, well-educated son of the wealthy and wise Anthemion, had the misfortune to walk into the midst of a discussion between Socrates and Meno over virtue. The question is whether virtue is knowledge and if it can be taught. In the questioning, Socrates secures agreement from Anytus that techne can be taught, and that it would be ludicrous to expect someone to possess techne without being taught. Then Socrates equivocates, and Anytus endorses arête as teachable, despite so many sons of Athens that seemed deficient. Anytus becomes confused and infuriated, accusing Socrates of slandering citizens, which to the cold gaze of reason means Anytus has signaled defeat. Arête has value to Anytus, but because he cannot articulate how it is transmitted, his understanding of it runs aground on the promontory of reason. Anytus accepts a truth without fully understanding it, and in this view of the dialogue through the mythical Socrates, truth must submit to reason. Truth is vivisected in the operating theatre, the razors of logic flaying it to bone, and in its final agony, something is learned. This is an absurd and cruel view of Socrates, but the hyperbole is useful; if Socrates is a creature of reason alone, and the reader is inclined to favor reason above all, then the reader might interpret that Socrates has done justice to Anytus and his beliefs. The emotionally castrated logician would have no sympatheia for Anytus. The mythical Socrates, at his worst, merits the accusations of Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon. It is fortunate for us, and for Socrates, that muthoi are not apodictic truths, and can accommodate the poets. I view Socrates through the glass of my Parmenides, Defender of Intuition, who left an indelible mark on Socrates and Plato.
Parmenides, seeing the fabulations that reason is capable of, relied on the intuition to identify and reject the illusions. He composed arguments so absurd that any sensible person would see the hollow construction of logic immediately, and understand mediately how reasonable arguments could be entirely counter-intuitive. I consider this a generous reading of Parmenides, and, extending this generosity to his contemporary audience to include Socrates, I find it likely that some Greeks reached the same conclusions about On Nature as I did. Socrates found himself trapped between the unstructured domain of Dionysian sensibility and the perfectly ordered realm of reason, but heeded the prophylactic of Parmenides against the deceptions of reason. The eidophusikon of reason, another Promethean statue of Truth, is every bit as illusory as the Apollonian individual, but both reason and the apperceiving individual seemed necessary to discover wisdom. Under the conditions of possible experience, where unconditioned knowledge or divine Truth is inaccessible, Socrates pursued a modest course to wisdom, apophatically. Rather than dismantle the beliefs of others, Socrates attacked the rationalizations of those beliefs, pitting his logic against theirs. Any rationalization that could withstand Socrates’ assaults would be a good candidate for the knowledge he sought. Anytus left his dialogue with Socrates angry and bewildered because his certainty about the passing of arête across generations had been reduced to being merely possible. Perhaps Socrates hoped that Anytus would discover the hazards of rationalization by the same route that Parmenides delivered the lesson, but Anytus, like Meletus and Lycon, only saw in Socrates the harm he had done to his reasoning. With this perceived injury in mind, I present the most potent means to redeem Socrates, though Nietzsche interprets it as a condemnation of him (BoT, 107): the portrayal of Socrates in Aristophanes’ Clouds.
Stories of the Waking Hours
Unlike the tragedies of Socrates’ time, which animated the muthoi in chorus and verse, the comedies dealt with contemporary events and, especially, prominent persons. Comedy was an opportunity to slander the representation of a man on stage without the consequences of doing so in the street. A mock trial, where justice could be served, and if a head rolled, it was likely of painted wicker. Poets like Aristophanes held the elite accountable in ways that most citizens could not, and it was in the interest of every public official, general, orator, or titan of commerce to comport themselves in a way that remained beneath the notice of the comic poet. Paul Roche says Clouds was first produced in 423 BCE (Aristophanes, 131), and estimates that Aristophanes was about 20 years old when Acharnians was produced (ix), which would put Socrates in his mid-40’s at the advent of Clouds, and likely at the peak of his intellectual and persuasive powers. If Plato’s Symposium can be believed, Socrates and Aristophanes are friends, some years after the debut of Clouds. Grant me yet another hypothesis, dear reader: consider that Aristophanes may have written Clouds as a favor to Socrates. It is clear enough from Plato’s Apology that Socrates accumulated a sour reputation in some quarters of Athens, but Socrates never pursued his slanderers in court, as is the due of any citizen; Socrates admits to never having been in a courtroom prior to his own trial (Apology, 17d). Instead of demanding that his slanderers withdraw their accusations, Socrates allows the accusations to be heard in the theatre. Socrates could not be humiliated by his absurd portrayal, as he was already humble; Clouds stunted the growing myth of a sly and dangerous Socrates by drowning the allegations in an unbelievable character. It seems unlikely that if Clouds were truly a condemnation of Socrates, that he and Aristophanes would be friends in the Symposium. Socrates comments on the old accusations against him during his trial (Apology, 19b-c), and notes that he can only name one of his accusers, Aristophanes. Rather than a complaint to the jury about a criminal indictment stemming from a comedy, this could be a public joke, recounting the plot of Clouds and how he had already been tried and sentenced by the audience to laughter. Aristophanes does not satirize Socrates, he honors the man. I will let the Socrates of Clouds speak for himself:
STREPSIADES: Looking down on the gods from a basket? Why not look up at them from the ground?
SOCRATES: Because to glean accurate knowledge of the heavens I have to suspend thought and meld my cerebral vibrations with the homogenous air. If I’d been down here and looked up there I wouldn’t have discovered a thing. The earth, you see, is forced to attract the moisture of thought. Watercress does the same. (Aristophanes, 144)
I can imagine bushels of Watercress being delivered to Xanthippe by raucous crowds returning from the Clouds; apotropaic leaves to ward off the thoughts of the mischievous Socrates.
Epilogue
Nietzsche has enemies in those who would negate myth and enshrine the rational, but I believe Socrates is not one of them; though their methods differ, their ends are similar. Nietzsche addresses the moral degeneracy of Germany as Socrates does for Athens. It may be that I have engaged in some self-deception, reading Nietzsche and Parmenides through Kant, and Socrates through my interpretation of Parmenides. Reason excels at speculation, and this essay is so laden with it that one might wonder if I have blown a ligament carrying it this far. Fear not, dear reader, I shall endure. I do not regard my novel views of Parmenides and Socrates as anything other than speculation, nor do I intend to displace the other perspectives on Socrates. Mine is just one myth among many, but the possibility of it is compelling to me, more than any certainty of it would be. Certainty is hard to come by in contingent experience, and reason allures us as much it may have Socrates. Nietzsche employed a poor representation of Socrates, taking the comic allegations of Aristophanes as serious. Philosophers are often troublemakers, especially when they abuse reason. If Prometheus is the embodiment of reason, the Theoretical Man, heedless of his effects on the world, then perhaps it is best for Zeus to keep him chained. I believe Socrates did his best to keep reason shackled, to be used only as a tool for negation of fallacious reasoning, not creation of it. My myth of Socrates helps me to redeem him from both Nietzsche’s criticism and from the amoral machinery of reason, but it does not have to be the divine Truth, merely true enough. Myths contain wisdom in their tales, and though myths often conflict, as mine does with the mythical Socrates of many philosophers, the myths do not negate one another; the stories are a sweetness to mask the oft bitter medicine of wisdom. If my mythical Socrates contains any wisdom at all, it may not be in the myth itself, but the possibilities implied by myths, which operate free of the necessity demanded by reason.
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