Nietzsche's Rejection of Socrates

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Four reasons why Nietzsche rejects Socrates as a fool, coward, and criminal: First, Nietzsche accused the Greeks of hating life and trying to escape to another world.

The so-called “wise” like Socrates assumed life is bad, and so so-called wise men like “Socrates and Plato” are “symptoms of degeneration” (Twilight, 474).

Life cannot be judged, and one lacks wisdom if they make a value judgment about it, avers Nietzsche (475). Socrates (and so Plato’s) hatred of life, their nihilistic attitude, can be seen at the trial of Socrates.

As Nietzsche notes, “Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he himself chose the hemlock; he forces Athens to sentence him” (Twilight, 479).

Using the voice of Socrates, Nietzsche sums up Socrates by saying: “’Socrates is no physician,’ he said softly to himself; ‘here death alone is the physician.

Socrates himself has merely been sick a long time” (Twilight 479). For Nietzsche, Socrates hates life, makes up another world, and thinks that his medicine is death.

The nihilism (self-destructive tendencies) of Socrates led him, for Nietzsche, to make a choice of coward: death over life. Second, Nietzsche argues that Socrates was a decadent monster.

After making fun of Socrates’s looks and words, Nietzsche gets to his main critique: how Socrates identifies happiness with reason and virtue (475). Such arguments went against the instincts of the Greeks, and Socrates wrongly battled such instincts.

The state that executed Socrates rightly warned that he would corrupt the youths; he did. Socrates was decadent and denied human instinct.

Basically, Nietzsche thinks the state’s accusations against Socrates were valid, and Socrates was a fool. Third, Nietzsche believes Socrates’s dialectic (reasoning by back-and-forth conversations) shows that his ineptitude and his intentionally untrustworthy nature.

“One choose dialectic only when on has no other means.

One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive” (Twilight, 476).

Fourth, rather than give Greece a real cure to their malady, Nietzsche says Socrates gave them an “apparent” (but not real) one: mastering our instincts by reason, supressing passion by self-control.

“When one finds it necessary to turn to reason into a tyrant, as Socrates did, the danger cannot be slight that something else will play the tyrant”(478).

The fanatic love of rationality, says Nietzsche, made the Greeks absurd. “The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato on is pathologically conditioned; so is their esteem of dialectics.

Reason-virtue-happiness, that means merely that one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent daylight—the daylight of reason.

One must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward” (478). All of this was decadence, a denial of instinct, for reason.

The whole project of Greek philosophy was a mistake—a misunderstanding not only of the problem but of the solution. “Socrates was a misunderstanding; the whole improvement-morality, including the Christian, was a misunderstanding” (478).

Rationality as a way to virtue and happiness was a total mistake. It was decadence, a ruination of society. “To have to fight the instincts—that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct” (479).