CHAPTER 1
THE GREEKS
Looking back over his life in 1888ââWhat I Owe to the Ancientsâ serves as the starting point for Nietzscheâs âautobiographyâ Ecce HomoâNietzsche declares that The Birth of Tragedy, first published in 1872, was his âfirst revaluation of all valuesâ (TI Ancients 5). It is from this âsoilââthat is, his study of the Greeksâthat his âwill,â his âabilities grow.â During this time Nietzsche had noted a series of reflections on The Birth in preparation for his âRevaluation of All Values,â demonstrating that the book and its themes were on his mind, and a number of letters of December 1888 echo this sentiment.1 To his confidant Heinrich Köselitz, whom he had dubbed âPeter Gast,â Nietzsche claims on December 22 that âsince the last four weeks I understand my works,â singling out The Birth as âsomething indescribable, profound, tender, happyâ (KSB 8). But he does not only claim to fully understand his books for the first time; he adds that he now âvaluesâ them, concluding that he is âabsolutely convinced that everything has been successful, since the beginningâthat everything tends toward unity.â âI have done everything very well, without realizing it,â he opines, feeling âfor the first time up to the task.â
The purpose of this chapter is to take seriously Nietzscheâs claim that The Birth was his first revaluation, less in terms of acquiring a better understanding of The Birth itself, than in view of gaining an insight into what the project for a revaluation of all values entails.2 I am less interested in following Heidegger in wanting to read into Nietzscheâs early writings the embryonic forms of his main philosophical theoriesâthe will to power, eternal return, and even perhaps overman, although I am sympathetic to certain aspects of that claim, as I will return to in chapter 4âbut rather I wish to posit a structural similarityâin terms of the respective parts and overall purpose, instead of the actual content, which importantly will changeâbetween The Birth and the âRevaluation.â3 What I mean to suggest is that Nietzscheâs goal with his revaluation project will remain the same as that of The Birth: restoring a healthy culture as the ancient Greeks had from which true philosophy can grow. And while he will maintain that to do so a hierarchical society is indispensable, he will come to reject certain aspects he thought necessary for such a transformation to take place. This latter will arise mainly from his split with Wagner: Nietzsche will come to reject Wagnerâs anti-Semitism, pan-German nationalism, and return to the âtrue essence of Christianity,â the latter of which he claimed not to have been particularly taken with in the first place (BT P 5).
The relationship that The Birth of Tragedy entertains with Wagnerâs total revolution will be the subject of the following chapter, especially how a disagreement over the role slavery played in the production of the Greek dramaâthe purest art form in history that Wagnerâs own Gesamtkunstwerk, his âtotal work of art,â aimed to reviveâobscured the political character of Nietzscheâs first work. The focus of this chapter, instead, will be on the soil from which Nietzsche claims his âabilities growâ: the Greeks. From his study of the Greeks, Nietzsche will garner a number of insights. First, as we have just seen, and again as will be examined more closely in the next chapter, a slave class is indispensable for culture. Nietzsche will remain faithful to this inference for the rest of his intellectual career, and we will have reason to return to it on numerous occasions throughout the book. Second, only from a healthy culture can genuine philosophers appear. One does not reestablish a healthy culture through decadent philosophy; rather, one must first restore the healthy instincts that are a prerequisite to a healthy culture. Finally, from his interpretation of Platoâs legislative mission, Nietzsche will glean a political strategy comprised of two elements: legislating for a new state, and training the men who will found it with him.
SOCRATES AND GREEK CULTURE
Nietzsche concurred with Wagner that only the ancient Greeks had attained the highest form of culture. For Wagner they had achieved âdrama,â the highest form of art that combined all its expressions (dance, tone, and poetry), which his own âtotal artworkâ aimed to reproduce. The Birth of Tragedy echoes the view that the Greeks had produced the highest art form, which Nietzsche would call tragedy, and the book concludes with a stirring defense of Wagnerâs projectâsomething it has often been criticized for.4 But for Nietzsche the Greeks were also the first to produce something elseâsomething they have so far remained unrivaled at producing: philosophers.
Nietzsche developed this thought in âPhilosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,â drafted in an incomplete form in 1873, itself drawn from a lecture series that Nietzsche had worked on and given in Basel throughout the 1870s, of which he wrote out a full manuscript version in 1872.5 Ironically, âPhilosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeksâ remained incomplete due to Wagner, who insisted Nietzsche turn his attention to writing a polemical tract, which was to become the first Untimely Meditation, against David Strauss. Nietzsche, however, thought his study indispensable, conceiving it as a âhookâ to The Birth of Tragedy.6 Nietzsche had started to work on the theme at the same time as he was writing The Birth, as the passing remarks on Heraclitus, among others, hint at.7 In fact, through the notions of the âaesthetic manâ and âchild at play,â Heraclitus, the hero of Nietzscheâs study and the philosopher to whom he was to remainâby his own avowalâthe closest to, already appears as the antithesis of the âSocratism in ethicsâ that caused the downfall of tragedy and consequently the Greeks.8 If the Greeks are therefore the soil from which Nietzscheâs desires and abilities grow, his studies of the âPre-Platonic Philosophers,â as the lecture series are known, comprised his first harvest.
His second was in his preparation for the âRevaluation of All Values.â In a letter to Carl von Gersdorff of April 5, 1873, anticipating his visit to Bayreuth where he would read sections of âPhilosophy in the Tragic Ageâ to the Wagners, indicating that it is âstill very far from a standard form of a book,â Nietzsche explains that he has already made three attempts to synthesize the pre-Platonic philosophers. The first was his 1865 study of Democritus through Friedrich Langeâs History of Materialism.9 The second was his lectures on the pre-Platonics, and his third was âPhilosophy in the Tragic Age.â He writes: âI have become increasingly harder toward myself and must still allow much time to pass in order to consider another treatment (the fourth on this same theme).â10 This fourth systematic treatment would only come when Nietzsche (re)turns to his revaluation project, having in the meantime developed his own philosophical position, finding its fullest expression in âThe Problem of Socratesâ and âWhat I Owe to the Ancientsâ in Twilight of the Idols. Indeed, it appears that Nietzsche reread his studies during that timeâeven annotating âPhilosophy in the Tragic Ageââand consequently there are remarkable continuities, as we will see, between these earlier and later treatments.11
The thesis of âPhilosophy in the Tragic Ageâ is that the Greeks have âjustified philosophy once and for all simply because they have philosophizedâ (PTAG 1). They justify philosophy because for them it sprung from a healthy culture, characterizedâanticipating the first Untimely Meditationâas the âunity of style.â Only from such a genuine culture can philosophy manifest itself as âhelpful, redeeming, or prophylactic.â As Nietzsche puts it, there is an âiron lawâ that binds a philosopher to a genuine culture. As such, the Greeks began philosophizing at the âright time,â which is to say in the âmidst of good fortune, at the peak of mature manhood, as a pursuit springing from the ardent joyousness of courageous and victorious maturity.â When they engaged in philosophy, they did so as âcivilized human beings,â with âhighly civilized aims.â Their activityâthough they were âquite unconscious of it,â as Nietzsche observesâtended toward the âhealing and purification of the wholeâ (PTAG 2).12
While a healthy culture can exist without philosophy, or with a moderate exercise of itâthe Romans lived, according to Nietzsche, their âbest periodâ without it (PTAG 1)âwhen philosophy takes root in an unhealthy society it spells disaster for both itself and the society in question. âWhere could we find an instance of cultural pathology that philosophy restored to health?â Nietzsche asks. If a culture is sick, then philosophy will make it even sicker. When a culture is disintegrating, philosophy is unable to reintegrate the individual back into the group. This is vital because a people is characterized not so much by its great men but instead by the way in which it ârecognizes and honorsâ them. When the philosopher takes root in a healthy culture, he âshines like a stellar object of the first magnitude.â In contrast, in a degenerate one, he appears as a âchance wanderer,â âlonely in a totally hostile environment that he either creeps past or attacks with clenched fistsâ; or again, as a âcomet, incalculable and therefore terror inspiring.â13 The Greeks thus âjustifyâ philosophy, according to Nietzsche, because only among them the philosopher is neither a chance wanderer nor a comet. In fact, they produced the âarchetypes of philosophical thought,â to which posterity, in Nietzscheâs view, has not made an essential contribution to since. These archetypes constitute the republic of geniuses that stretches from Thales to Socrates. They are what Nietzsche variously calls either âmonolithicâ or âone-sided,â settling on the term âpure typesâ of philosophers, as while they may influence one anotherâcalling and bridging out to one another through the âdesolate intervals of timeââthey are all the âfirst-born sons of philosophyâ because they all generated from within themselves their own personal, fundamental idea (e.g., for Thales everything is water, and for Heraclitus everything is fire) (PTAG 1â2).
With Plato, however, starts something new. If the republic of geniuses consists of pure philosopher types of the âone idea,â Plato is the first great mixed type, both in his philosophyâhis doctrine of Ideas combines Socratic, Pythagorean, and Heraclitean elements, and therefore should not be considered, according to Nietzsche, an entirely original conceptionâand personality, which mingles the features of a âregally proud Heraclitus with the melancholy, secretive and legislative Pythagoras and the reflective dialectician Socratesâ (PTAG 2).14 All philosophers after Plato are such mixed types. Furthermore, instead of working for the âhealing and purification of the whole,â the mixed types are founders of sects, in opposition to the previous unity of style.15 If their philosophy also sought salvation, it is only for the individual or a small group of peopleâthe sect. Rather than protect their native land, philosophers, with Plato, become exiles, âconspiring against their fatherland.â
This is in effect one of the fundamental differences between Socrates and Plato, and it is a political difference: while Socrates is still a âgood citizenâ who tries to help his fellow countrymen, Plato desires, as I will explore further in the following section, to overthrow his contemporary polis to found a new state.16 We now also understand the meaning of the title of the lecture series âThe Pre-Platonic Philosophersâ: the separation occurs between the pure types from Thales to Socrates and the mixed types starting with Plato. The existence of an âAthenian school,â comprised of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotleâand hence before them the more conventionally called pre-Socraticsâis hereby challenged by Nietzsche: Plato is a mixed type consisting of non-Athenian elements such as Heraclitus and the Pythagoreans. But more fundamentally: Why this disjuncture? To answer that question we must turn to Nietzscheâs understanding of Socrates and Plato, who stand on either side of the turning point, and thereby investigate his account of the decadence of the Greeks.
Nietzscheâs relationship to Socrates has been the subject of an extensive and discordant debate, ranging from Socrates being depicted as Nietzscheâs ultimate âvillainâ in the history of philosophy with Nietzsche himself as the final hero, to being presented by him as a âdemigod,â equal in stature to Apollo and Dionysus.17 In what follows I will side with those who see Nietzscheâs view of Socrates as inherently ambivalent, understood as Nietzsche being of two minds about Socrates: while he is the last genius of the republic of philosophers, Socrates is also the first decadent philosopher whose moralism corrupted all those after him.18 So if Nietzsche takes on the Socratic role of being the âcritic,â âgadfly,â or âbad conscienceâ of his time (PPP Socrates; HH 433; BGE 212; CW P), he rejects the moral method that Socrates employs. This position vis-Ă -vis Socrates is perhaps best summed up by an early note that Nietzsche pens, in which he remarks that âSocrates, to confess it frankly, is so close to me that I almost always fight with himâ (KSA 8 6 [3]).19 Nietzsche feels close to Socrates in being the gadfly of his time, yet fights against the legacy of his moralism. Moreover, as throughout the book, I want to underline certain basic continuities between Nietzscheâs early and later thinkingâin this case, his t...