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Figures
from his attitude in the face of death. More specifically, it came from the semi-voluntary nature of his death. As early as his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche summed up the last pages of the Phaedo and the Symposium in a grandiose image:
that he was sentenced to death, not exile, Socrates himself seems to have brought about with perfect awareness and without any natural awe of death. He went to his death with the calm with which, according to Plato's description, he leaves the Symposium at dawn, the last of the revelers, to begin a new day, while on the benches and on the ground his drowsy table companions remain behind to dream of Socrates, the true Eroticist. The dying Socrates becomes the new ideal, never seen before, of noble Greek youths. m
Nietzsche sensed and foresaw, in the concluding scene of Plato's Symposium, a symbol of Socrates' death. Taken by itself, Plato's description of the scene was as simple as could be:
Only Agathon, Aristophanes and Socrates were still awake, and they were passing a huge bowl from left to right, and drinking from it.
Socrates was holding a discussion with them . . . he was gradually forcing them to admit that one and the same author ought to be able to compose both comic and tragic poetry . . . Aristophanes was the first to fall asleep, and then, when the sun had already risen, Agathon. Socrates
. . . then got up and left. He headed for the Lyceum, and, after splashing himself with water, he spent the rest of the day just like he would have any other. m
The ambiguous symbolism latent in this sober passage has not been lost on modern poets. C.F. Meyer, for instance, gave the following picture of the figure of the dying Socrates, in that dawn when only the philosopher is still awake:
While Socrates' friends drank with him
And their heads sank down on their pillows
A young man came in I remember it well
-
Along with two lithe flute-players.
We drained our cups to the dregs,
And our lips, tired from so much talk, fell silent A song hovered above the withered garlands , ,
.
Silence! The Nlccpy flutes of dcnth nre Nmmdinl(l11'
The Figure of Socrates
167
By contrast, what Holderlin saw in this episode was Socrates the lover of life: Yet each of us has his measure.
For hard to bear
Is misfortune, but harder still good fortune.
Yet one wise man was able
From noon to midnight, and on
Till morning lit up the sky
To keep wide awake at the banquet.126
Herein lies the enigma Socrates posed for Nietzsche. How could someone who loved life as much as Socrates loved it seem, by his will to die, to hate existence? For Nietzsche was quite familiar with the Socrates who loved life; indeed, he loved him:
If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the Memorabiliam of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason, and when Montaigne and Horace will be employed as forerunners and signposts to an understanding of Socrates, that simplest and most imperishable of intercessors. The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life lead back to him . . . Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in possessing a joyful kind of seriousness and that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul.128
We can see Socrates' "wisdom full of roguishness" in Xenophon's depiction of Socrates dancing; 129 in the jesting, ironical Socrates of the Platonic dialogues; and in the figure of the life-loving philosopher in Holderlin's poem "Socrates and Alkibiades":
"Holy Socrates, why do you always
Pay court to this young man?
Do you know nothing greater?
Why do your eyes gaze lovingly· on him
As on a god?"
"He who has thought most deeply
Loves that which is the most alive.
He who has seen the world
Can understand lofty Youth.
And often, in the end,
The wise bow down before the fair."1.10
In N icl.1.Hchc'N CHHay Srh1Jpenl1auer cu Educator, the figure of Schopenhauer is mcriccd with l hiN fiicurc of Socrntcs-as-lovcr-of-lifc. In the following
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Figures
extraordinary passage, Nietzsche has recourse to Holderlin's verses in order to describe the sage's gaiety:
Nothing better or happier can befall a man than to be in the proximity of one of those victorious ones, who, precisely because they have thought most deeply, must love what is most living and, as sages, incline in the end to the beautiful . . They are active and truly alive . . . which is why, in their
.
proximity, we feel human and natural for once, and feel like exclaiming with Goethe: "How glorious and precious is a living thing! how well adapted to the conditions it lives in, how true, how existent!" 131
In The Birth of Tragedy,132 Nietzsche thought he could foresee the coming of a musical Socrates. Socrates the musician, he thought, would answer the call which, in Socrates' dreams, had invited the philosopher to devote himself to music; he would thereby reconcile the ironic lucidity of rational consciousness with demonic enthusiasm. Such a figure, says Nietzsche in his unpublished writings, would be a true example of "tragic man." Nietzsche projected his own dream of a reconciliation between Apollo and Dionysos into this image of Socrates as musician.
In the dying Socrates, Nietzsche saw yet another reflection of his own drama. Socrates wa111ed to die - this is what was so shocking to Nietzsche -
and at the moment of his death his spoke these enigmatic words: "0 Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius." 133 It was as if he had been cured from some illness, and owed a debt to the god of healing.
This ridiculous and terrible "last word" means, for those who have ears:
"0 Crito, life is a disease." Is it possible that a man like him . . . should have been a pessimist? He had merely kept a cheerful mien while concealing all his life long his ultimate judgment, his inmost feeling.
Socrates, Socrates suffered life! And then he still revenged himself- with this veiled, gruesome, pious, and blasphemous saying . . . I wish he had remained taciturn also at the last moment of his life; in that case he might have belonged to a still higher order of spirits.134
As Bertram has shown so well, Nietzsche here gives us the clue to his own secret, intimate doubt, and to the drama of his entire existence. Nietzsche would have liked to be the bard of the joy of life and existence; yet, in the final analysis, wasn't he, too, afraid that life might be nothing but a disease? By letting what he thought of terrestrial existence be known, Socrates gave his secret away. Yet Nietzsche wanJed to belong to that "higher order of spirits": those, that is, who
<:an keep quiet about this terrifying secret. In Bertram's words: "Wm; his extreme, Dionysiac pac.·m to life, and to lite nlonc, only the kind of Nilcnn.·, bcncnth which n grl'llt educator for life did no1 believe in lilc?" I I\
The Figure of Socrates
1 69
In the Twilight of the Idols, we find one final reversal in Nietzsche's reinterpretation of Socrates' last words. Here, the sick�ess from which Socrates is to be cured is not life itself, but the kind of life Socrates led:
" 'Socrates is no physician,' he said softly to himself; 'here death alone is the physician. Socrates himself has merely been sick for a long time. ' " 136 On this interpretation, Socratic lucidity and Socratic morality correspond to a sickness gnawing away at life. Yet, here again, might not Socrates' illness be the same as that of Nietzsche himself? This myth-dissolving lucidity, this pitiless consciousness; are they not those of Nietzsche himself? Nietzsche's amorous hatred for Socrates was, in the last analysis, identical with the amorous hatred Nietzsche felt for himself. Perhaps the ambiguity of the figure of Socrates in Nietzsche was rooted in the ambiguity of the central figure of Nietzschean mythology: Dionysos, god of death and of life.