Craig White's Literature Courses

Critical Sources

Notes to Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
(1872, 1886)

Chapter 13

Glossary to Birth of Tragedy
Socrates (bust), the Louvre

Euripides & Socrates

64 story that Socrates helped Euripides with writing

Old robust Marathon soundness > suspect enlightenment with progressive atrophy of physical and mental forces

 

64-5 comedies of Aristophanes: Socrates chief of Sophists

[65 (from Glossary) Aristophanes . . . Socrates appeared in the plays of Aristophanes as the chief of the Sophists: In The Clouds (423 BC) the comic playwright Aristophanes (ca. 446–ca. 386 BC; author of Lysistrata) depicted Socrates as a petty thief, a fraud, and a sophist. The Greek word “sophoi”—the word behind “sophomore,” philosophy, and woman’s name “Sophia”—indicated a person wise in a skill or tradition. In classical philosopy the Sophists were a school of itinerant intellectuals who speculated on language and culture and cultivated excellence through courses in various subjects such as politics, ethics, or household management. “Sophist” today means someone pretending to wisdom through deceptive language or logic. Sophists’ bad reputation stems partly from the loss of their own writings and surviving attacks on them by rival schools. Socrates and Plato denounced Sophists for sometimes charging fees for instruction. ]

65 Close identification b/w Socrates and Euripides in minds of ancients

Socrates an enemy of art of tragedy except for Euripides

Oracle: Socrates as wisest, Euripides as 2nd prize, Sophocles 3rd

lucidity of their knowledge

radical new admiration for knowledge and insight

Sophocles, unlike Aeschylus, knew the right thing

Most acute: Socrates’s admission that he knew nothing: celebrities only simulation of knowledge, work “only instinctively” < heart and core of Socratic intention

saw in instinct only lack of insight and power of delusion

deduction: prevailing siituation misguided and reprehensible

 

66 Socrates's irreverence and superiority: precursor of radically different culture, art, and morality

Essence of Greece: What daemonic power could embolden anyone to throw this magic potion in the dust?

Socrates’s daimonion: divine voice of guidance; x-conscious knowledge

productive people: instinct = power of creation and affirmation

In Socrates instinct becomes the critic, consciousness the creator

Embodiment of the non-mystic

Tremendous driving-wheel of logical Socratism

 

67 corrosive influence on the instincts

Socrates went to his death peacefully

The dying Socrates became the new ideal for noble Greek youth [ch. 12. > a secret cult which was gradually to cover whole world

[cult of reason . . . Nietzsche respects reason but mourns loss of world in which civilizations and art were motivated by myth and its associated drives, instincts, emotions; cf. "the American Dream," "the frontier," "equality," "exceptionalism," etc. in American civilization]

[each of us uses reason to simplify the world, separate what we can do or not, but we feel painfully limited or cut off from the enormity, complexity, and energy of the wider world, which so far humans connect to socially through myth or other Dionysiac powers]

 


The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

[from Glossary: 67 the dying Socrates: The trial and death of Socrates at the age of 70 in 399 BC resulted from accusations of impiety and of corrupting youth.

The chief surviving records are four dialogues by his student Plato (including the Phaedo), and Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates to the Jury.

Socrates’s behavior at his trial seemed to invite his conviction, and Socrates calmly drank poison while his students mourned.]