Interlude XVIII. Nietzsche - part 7

The daemon of Socrates

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XVII. Nietzsche - part 6

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...

Sec 13 - The daimonion of Socrates

The daemon is a divine “something” between men and gods that inspires a man. From Wiki:

In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler but his guiding daemon that was venerated. In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daemon had been democratized and internalized for each person, whom it served to guide, motivate and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. Similarly, the 1st-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.

The Delphic oracle proclaimed Socrates to be the wisest man, followed by Euripides and Sophocles. But Aristophanes portrays him as the supreme Sophist and the government of Athens found him guilty of not believing in the gods of the city and of corrupting youth. Nietzsche is much harder on him.

[According to Nietzsche, Socrates attacks all who live...] "Only by instinct"... 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... 

...What demonic power is this that dares spill this magic potion [Hellenic Greek culture] into dust?...

...Socrates might be called the typical non-mystic, in whom, through a hypertrophy, the logical nature is developed as excessively as instinctive wisdom is in the mystic... [And yet he is directed by his daemon.] 

...it was as impossible to refute him here [in his belief in his divine calling] as to approve of his instinct-disintegrating influence... [And his execution did no good in the long run as,] ...The dying Socrates became the new ideal, never seen before, of noble Greek youth....

I suspect Nietzsche is also thinking of Alcibiades here, Socrates’s companion and the military genius who was chased from Athens and left her without a great leader just when she most needed one. 

Settembrini, in The Magic Mountain, is very like Socrates in his passion for reason and for ending suffering through knowledge.

Sec 14 - The Platonic dialogue

...To this [Socrates's] eye was denied the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses. What, then, did it have to see in the ‘sublime and greatly lauded’ tragic art, as Plato called it? Something rather unreasonable, full of causes apparently without effects, and effects apparently without causes; the whole, moreover, so motley and manifold that it could not but be repugnant to a sober mind, and a dangerous tinder for sensitive and susceptible souls...

...Plato’s main objection to the older art [poetic tragedy] -- that it is the imitation of a phantom and hence belongs to a sphere even lower than the empirical world -- could certainly not be directed against the new art [his dialogues]; and so we find Plato endeavoring to transcend reality and to present the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality. Thus Plato, the thinker, arrived by a detour where he had always been at home as a poet -- at the point from which Sophocles and the older art protested solemnly against that objection. If tragedy had absorbed into itself all the earlier types of art, the same might also be said in an eccentric sense of the Platonic dialogue which, a mixture of all extant styles and forms, hovers midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry, and so has also broken the strict old law of the unity of linguistic form....

The Platonic dialogue was, as it were, the barge on which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself with all her children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly submitting to the single pilot, Socrates, they now sailed into a new world... Indeed, Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel -- which may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to dialectical philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: namely, the rank of ancilla [handmaid]. This was the new position into which Plato, under the pressure of the demonic Socrates, forced poetry.

Here philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectic... Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: ‘Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy.’ In these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy. For now the virtuous hero must be a dialectician; now there must be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality; now the transcendental justice of Aeschylus is degraded to the superficial and insolent principle of ‘poetic justice’ with its customary deus ex machina.

At this point the translator, Walter Kaufmann, points out that:

...the superabundance of dialectical fireworks in... [the tragedies of Euripides] ...usually illustrates the futility of reason, its inability to prevent tragedy. Optimistic dialectic drives music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms; that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and projection into images of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolizing of music, as the dreamworld of a Dionysian intoxication.

[Nietzsche then reflects on Socrates sudden determination to practice music in his final days before execution.] ...Perhaps -- thus he must have asked himself -- what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science?

Next: Interlude XIX. Nietzsche - part 8.