Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Marianne Cowan

• Publisher: Gateway Editions
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781596983021
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía antigua y clásica

For Nietzsche the Age of Greek Tragedy was indeed a tragic age. He saw in it the rise and climax of values so dear to him that their subsequent drop into catastrophe (in the person of Socrates - Plato) was clearly foreshadowed as though these were events taking place in the theater. And so in this work, unpublished in his own day but written at the same time that his The Birth of Tragedy had so outraged the German professorate as to imperil his own academic career, his most deeply felt task was one of education. He wanted to present the culture of the Greeks as a paradigm to his young German contemporaries who might thus be persuaded to work toward a state of culture of their own; a state where Nietzsche found sorely missing.

1

There are people who are opposed to all philosophy and one does well to listen to them, particularly when they advise the diseased minds of Germans to stay away from metaphysics, instead preaching purification through physis as Goethe did, or healing through music, as did Richard Wagner. The physicians of our culture repudiate philosophy. Whoever wishes to justify it must show, therefore, to what ends. a healthy culture uses and has used philosophy. Perhaps the sick will then actually gain salutary insight into why philosophy is harmful specifically to them. There are good instances, to be sure, of a type of health which can exist altogether without philosophy, or with but a very moderate, almost playful, exercise of it. The Romans during their best period lived without philosophy. But where could we find an instance of cultural pathology which philosophy restored to health? If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made ever sicker. Wherever a culture was disintegrating, wherever the tension between it and its individual components was slack, philosophy could never re-integrate the individuals back into the group. Wherever an individual was of a mind to stand apart, to draw a circle of self-sufficiency about himself, philosophy was ready to isolate him still further, finally to destroy him through that isolation. Philosophy is dangerous wherever it does not exist in its fullest right, and it is only the health of a culture—and not every culture at that—which accords it such fullest right.

And now let us look around for the highest authority for what we may term cultural health. The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and engaged in it more fully than any other people. They could not even stop engaging in philosophy at the proper time; even in their skinny old age they retained the hectic postures of ancient suitors, even when all they meant by philosophy was but the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair-splittings of Christian dogmatics. By the fact that they were unable to stop in time, they considerably diminished their merit for barbaric posterity, because this posterity, in the ignorance and unrestraint of its youth, was bound to get caught in those too artfully woven nets and ropes.

On the other hand the Greeks knew precisely how to begin at the proper time, and the lesson of how one must start out in philosophy they demonstrate more plainly than any other people. Not to wait until a period of affliction (as those who derive philosophy from personal moroseness imagine), but to begin in the midst of good fortune, at the peak of mature manhood, as a pursuit springing from the ardent joyousness of courageous and victorious maturity. At such a period of their culture the Greeks engaged in philosophy, and this teaches us not only what philosophy is and does, but also gives us information about the Greeks themselves. For if they had been the sober and precocious technicians and the cheerful sensates that the learned philistines of our day imagine they were, or if they had floated solely in a self-indulgent fog, reverberating with heavy breathings and deep feelings, as the unscholarly fantasts among us like to assume, the well-spring of philosophy should never have seen the light of day in Greece. At most it would have produced a rivulet soon to lose itself in the sands or evaporate in a haze. It never could have become that broad proud stream which we know as Greek philosophy.

It has been pointed out assiduously, to be sure, how much the Greeks were able to find and learn abroad in the Orient, and it is doubtless true that they picked up much there. It is a strange spectacle, however, to see the alleged teachers from the Orient and their Greek disciples exhibited side by side: Zoroaster next to Heraclitus, Hindus next to Eleatics, Egyptians next to Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras amidst the Jews and Pythagoras amidst the Chinese. As to specifics, very little has been discovered by such juxtaposition. As to the general idea, we should not mind it, if only its exponents did not burden us with their conclusion that philosophy was thus merely imported into Greece rather than having grown and developed there in a soil natural and native to it. Or worse, that philosophy being alien to the Greeks, it very likely contributed to their ruin more than to their well-being. Nothing would be sillier than to claim an autochthonous development for the Greeks. On the contrary, they invariably absorbed other living cultures. The very reason they got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher than our neighbor. The quest for philosophy’s beginnings is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels. People who prefer to spend their time on Egyptian or Persian philosophy rather than on Greek, on the grounds that the former are more “original” and in any event older, are just as ill-advised as those who cannot deal with the magnificent, profound mythology of the Greeks until they have reduced it to the physical trivialities of sun, lightning, storm and mist which originally presumably gave rise to it. They are the people, also, who imagine they have found a purer form of religion than that of Greek polytheism when they discover the good old Aryans restricting their worship to the single vault of heaven. Everywhere, the way to the beginnings leads to barbarism. Whoever concerns himself with the Greeks should be ever mindful that an unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as a hatred of knowledge. The Greeks themselves, possessed of an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge, controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life. Whatever they learned, they wanted to live through, immediately. They engaged in philosophy, as in everything else, as civilized human beings, and with highly civilized aims, wherefore, free of any kind of autochthonous conceit, they forebore trying to re-invent the elements of philosophy and science. Rather they instantly tackled the job of so fulfilling, enhancing, elevating and purifying the elements they took over from elsewhere that they became inventors after all, but in a higher sense and a purer sphere. For what they invented was the archetypes of philosophic thought. All posterity has not made an essential contribution to them since.

All other cultures are put to shame by the marvellously idealized philosophical company represented by the ancient Greek masters Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus and Socrates. These men are monolithic. Their thinking and their character stand in a relationship characterized by strictest necessity. They are devoid of conventionality, for in their day there was no philosophic or academic professionalism. All of them, in magnificent solitude, were the only ones of their time whose lives were devoted to insight alone. They all possessed that virtuous energy of the ancients, herein excelling all men since, which led them to find their own individual form and to develop it through all its metamorphoses to its subtlest and greatest possibilities. For there was no convention to meet them halfway. Thus all of them together form what Schopenhauer in contrast to the republic of scholars has called the republic of creative minds: each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time. And undisturbed by the wanton noises of the dwarfs that creep past beneath them, their high spirit-converse continues.

Of this high spirit-converse I have resolved to tell the story. At least whatever part of it our modern hardness of hearing can hear and understand—probably a negligible amount. It seems to me that those ancient wise men, from Thales through Socrates, have touched in their conversation all those things, albeit in their most generalized form, which to our minds constitutes typical Hellenism. In their conversation as in their personalities they form the great-featured mold of Greek genius whose ghostly print, whose blurred and less expressive copy, is the whole of Greek history. If we could interpret correctly the sum total of Greek culture, all we would find would be the reflection of the image which shines forth brightly from its greatest luminaries. The very first experience that philosophy had on Greek soil, the sanction of the Seven Sages, is an unmistakable and unforgettable feature of the Hellenic image. Other peoples have saints; the Greeks have sages. It has been rightly said that a people is characterized not as much by its great men as by the way in which it recognizes and honors its great men. In other times and places, the philosopher is a chance wanderer, lonely in a totally hostile environment which he either creeps past or attacks with clenched fist. Among the Greeks alone, he is not an accident. When he appears in the sixth and fifth centuries, among the enormous dangers and temptations of increasing secularization, walking as it were out of the cave of Trophonius straight into the midst of the lavish luxuriance, the pioneer freedom, the wealth and sensuality of the Greek colonies, we may suspect that he comes, a distinguished warning voice, to express the same purpose to which the tragic drama was born during that century, and of which the Orphic mysteries hint in the grotesque hieroglyphics of their rites. The judgment of those philosophers as to life and existence in general means so much more than any modern judgment, for they had life in lavish perfection before their eyes, whereas the feeling of our thinkers is confused by our split desire for freedom, beauty and greatness on the one hand and our drive toward truth on the other, a drive which asks merely “And what is life worth, after all?” The philosopher’s mission when he lives in a genuine culture (which is characterized by unity of style) cannot be properly derived from our own circumstances and experiences, for we have no genuine culture. Only a culture such as the Greeks possessed can answer our question as to the task of the philosopher, and only it, I repeat, can justify philosophy at all, because it alone knows and can demonstrate why and how the philosopher is not a chance random wanderer, exiled to this place or to that. There is a steely necessity which binds a philosopher to a genuine culture. But what if such a culture does not exist? Then the philosopher is a comet, incalculable and therefore terror-inspiring. When all is well, he shines like a stellar object of the first magnitude in the solar system of culture. That is why the Greeks justify philosophers. Only among them, they are not comets.

2

After these reflections I shall presumably be understood if I speak of the pre-Platonic philosophers as of one homogenous company and plan to devote this essay to them alone. With Plato, something entirely new has its beginning. Or it might be said with equal justice, from Plato on there is something essentially amiss with philosophers when one compares them to that “republic of creative minds” from Thales to Socrates.

Whoever wants to point out the disadvantageous aspect of the older masters may call them one-sided and their posterity, including Plato at the head, many-sided. But it would be more correct and simple to comprehend the latter as philosophic mixed types, and the former as pure types. Plato himself is the first mixed type on a grand scale, expressing his nature in his philosophy no less than in his personality. Socratic, Pythagorean and Heraclitic elements are all combined in his doctrine of Ideas. This doctrine is not a phenomenon exhibiting a pure philosophic type. As a human being, too, Plato mingles the features of the regal exclusive and self-contained Heraclitus with the melancholy compassionate and legislative Pythagoras and the psychologically acute dialectician Socrates. All subsequent philosophers are such mixed types. Where a certain one-sidedness is paramount in them, in the Cynics for example, it is not a type phenomenon but one of caricature. What is far more important, however, is that the mixed types were founders of sects, and that sectarianism with its institutions and counterinstitutions was opposed to Hellenic culture and its previous unity of style. Such philosophers too sought salvation in their own way, but only for the individual or for a small inside group of friends and disciples. The activity of the older philosophers, on the other hand (though they were quite unconscious of it) tended toward the healing and the purification of the whole. It is the mighty flow of Greek culture that shall not be impeded; the terrible dangers in its path shall be cleared away: thus did the philosopher protect and defend his native land. But later, beginning with Plato, philosophers became exiles, conspiring against their fatherland.

It is a veritable misfortune that we have so little extant of the works of the ancient masters and that not a single one of their works was handed down to us complete. We are involuntarily influenced by this loss, measuring therefore with false standards, and letting ourselves be disposed more favorably toward Plato and Aristotle by the sheer accident that they never lacked connoisseurs and copyists. Some go so far as to assume a special destiny reserved for books, a fatum libellorum. Such a fate would have to be malicious indeed to deprive us of Heraclitus, of the wonderful poetry of Empedocles, and of the writings of Democritus, thought by the ancients to be Plato’s equal and, so far as ingenuity is concerned, his superior, slipping us instead the Stoics, the Epicureans, and Cicero. Very likely the most impressive part of Greek thought and its verbal expression is lost to us, a fate not to be wondered at if one remembers the misfortunes that befell Scotus Erigena and Pascal and the fact that in even this enlightened century the first edition of Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung had to be sold for wastepaper. If someone wishes to assume a special fatal power governing such events, he may do so and say with Goethe “Do not complain of the mean and the petty, for regardless of what you have been told, the mean and the petty are everywhere in control.” That they are more in control than the power of truth is certainly true. Mankind so rarely produces a good book, one which with bold freedom sounds the battle-cry of truth, the song of philosophic heroism. And yet the most wretched accidents, sudden eclipses of men’s minds, superstitious paroxysms and antipathies, cramped or lazy writing fingers, down to book worms and rainfall, all determine whether or not a book will live on another century or turn into ashes and mould. But let us not lament or, in any event, remember the consolatory words with which Hamann put an end to the lamentations of scholars over lost works. “Did not the artist who squeezed a lentil through the eye of a needle find enough lentils in a bushel to practice his acquired skill? One should like to put this question to all the scholars who make no better use of the works of the ancients than that man did of his lentils.” In the case before us, we might add, we do not need an additional word, anecdote, or date other than those transmitted to us. In fact we do not need all that we do have, in order to demonstrate our general proposition that the Greeks justify philosophy.

A period which suffers from a so-called high general level of liberal education but which is devoid of culture in the sense of a unity of style which characterizes all its life, will not quite know what to do with philosophy and wouldn’t, if the Genius of Truth himself were to proclaim it in the streets and the market places. During such times philosophy remains the learned monologue of the lonely stroller, the accidental loot of the individual, the secret skeleton in the closet, or the harmless chatter between senile academics and children. No one may venture to fulfill philosophy’s law with his own person, no one may live philosophically with that simple loyalty which compelled an ancient, no matter where he was or what he was doing, to deport himself as a Stoic if he once had pledged faith to the Stoa. All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academies, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness. Our philosophy stops with the sigh “If only . . . ” and with the insight “Once upon a time . . . ” Philosophy has no rights, and modern man, if he had any courage or conscience, should really repudiate it. He might ban it with words similar to those which Plato used to ban the tragic poets from his state, though reply could be made, just as the tragic poets might have made reply to Plato. If forced for once to speak out, philosophy might readily say, “Wretched people! Is it my fault if I am roaming the country among you like a cheap fortune-telle...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Preface
• A LATER PREFACE
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Gateway Editions
• Copyright Page