Section 15
Original German
Im Sinne dieser letzten ahnungsvollen Fragen muss nun ausgesprochen werden, wie der Einfluss des Sokrates, bis auf diesen Moment hin, ja in alle Zukunft hinaus, sich, gleich einem in der Abendsonne immer grösser werdenden Schatten, über die Nachwelt hin ausgebreitet hat, wie derselbe zur Neuschaffung der Kunst—und zwar der Kunst im bereits metaphysischen, weitesten und tiefsten Sinne—immer wieder nöthigt und, bei seiner eignen Unendlichkeit, auch deren Unendlichkeit verbürgt.
Bevor dies erkannt werden konnte, bevor die innerste Abhängigkeit jeder Kunst von den Griechen, den Griechen von Homer bis auf Sokrates, überzeugend dargethan war, musste es uns mit diesen Griechen ergehen wie den Athenern mit Sokrates. Fast jede Zeit und Bildungsstufe hat einmal sich mit tiefem Missmuthe von den Griechen zu befreien gesucht, weil Angesichts derselben alles Selbstgeleistete, scheinbar völlig Originelle, und recht aufrichtig Bewunderte plötzlich Farbe und Leben zu verlieren schien und zur misslungenen Copie, ja zur Caricatur zusammenschrumpfte. Und so bricht immer von Neuem einmal der herzliche Ingrimm gegen jenes anmaassliche Völkchen hervor das sich erkühnte, alles Nichteinheimische für alle Zeiten als „barbarisch“ zu bezeichnen: wer sind jene, fragt man sich, die, obschon sie nur einen ephemeren historischen Glanz, nur lächerlich engbegrenzte Institutionen, nur eine zweifelhafte Tüchtigkeit der Sitte aufzuweisen haben und sogar mit hässlichen Lastern gekennzeichnet sind, doch die Würde und Sonderstellung unter den Völkern in Anspruch nehmen, die dem Genius unter der Masse zukommt? Leider war man nicht so glücklich den Schierlingsbecher zu finden, mit dem ein solches Wesen einfach abgethan werden konnte: denn alles Gift, das Neid, Verläumdung und Ingrimm in sich erzeugten, reichte nicht hin, jene selbstgenugsame Herrlichkeit zu vernichten. Und so schämt und fürchtet man sich vor den Griechen; es sei denn, dass Einer die Wahrheit über alles achte und so sich auch diese Wahrheit einzugestehn wage, dass die Griechen unsere und jegliche Cultur als Wagenlenker in den Händen haben, dass aber fase immer Wagen und Pferde von zu geringem Stoffe und der Glorie ihrer Führer unangemessen sind, die dann es für einen Scherz erachten, ein solches Gespann in den Abgrund zu jagen: über den sie selbst, mit dem Sprunge des Achilles, hinwegsetzen.
Um die Würde einer solchen Führerstellung auch für Sokrates zu erweisen, genügt es in ihm den Typus einer vor ihm unerhörten Daseinsform zu erkennen, den Typus des theoretischen Menschen, über dessen Bedeutung und Ziel zur Einsicht zu kommen, unsere nächste Aufgabe ist. Auch der theoretische Mensch hat ein unendliches Genügen am Vorhandenen, wie der Künstler, und ist wie jener vor der praktischen Ethik des Pessimismus und vor seinen nur im Finsteren leuchtenden Lynkeusaugen, durch jenes Genügen geschützt. Wenn nämlich der Künstler bei jeder Enthüllung der Wahrheit immer nur mit verzückten Blicken an dem hängen bleibt, was auch jetzt, nach der Enthüllung, noch Hülle bleibt, geniesst und befriedigt sich der theoretische Mensch an der abgeworfenen Hülle und hat sein höchstes Lustziel in dem Prozess einer immer glücklichen, durch eigene Kraft gelingenden Enthüllung. Es gäbe keine Wissenschaft, wenn ihr nur um jene eine nackte Göttin und um nichts Anderes zu thun wäre. Denn dann müsste es ihren Jüngern zu Muthe sein, wie Solchen, die ein Loch gerade durch die Erde graben wollten: von denen ein Jeder einsieht, dass er, bei grösster und lebenslänglicher Anstrengung, nur ein ganz kleines Stück der ungeheuren Tiefe zu durchgraben im Stande sei, welches vor seinen Augen durch die Arbeit des Nächsten wieder überschüttet wird, so dass ein Dritter wohl daran zu thun scheint, wenn er auf eigne Faust eine neue Stelle für seine Bohrversuche wählt. Wenn jetzt nun Einer zur Ueberzeugung beweist, dass auf diesem directen Wege das Antipodenziel nicht zu erreichen sei, wer wird noch in den alten Tiefen weiterarbeiten wollen, es sei denn, dass er sich nicht inzwischen genügen lasse, edles Gestein zu finden oder Naturgesetze zu entdecken. Darum hat Lessing, der ehrlichste theoretische Mensch, es auszusprechen gewagt, dass ihm mehr am Suchen der Wahrheit als an ihr selbst gelegen sei: womit das Grundgeheimniss der Wissenschaft, zum Erstaunen, ja Aerger der Wissenschaftlichen, aufgedeckt worden ist. Nun steht freilich neben dieser vereinzelten Erkenntniss, als einem Excess der Ehrlichkeit, wenn nicht des Uebermuthes, eine tiefsinnige Wahnvorstellung, welche zuerst in der Person des Sokrates zur Welt kam, jener unerschütterliche Glaube, dass das Denken, an dem Leitfaden der Causalität, bis in die tiefsten Abgründe des Seins reiche, und dass das Denken das Sein nicht nur zu erkennen, sondern sogar zu corrigiren im Stande sei. Dieser erhabene metaphysische Wahn ist als Instinct der Wissenschaft beigegeben und führt sie immer und immer wieder zu ihren Grenzen, an denen sie in Kunst umschlagen muss: auf welche es eigentlich, bei diesem Mechanismus, abgesehn ist.
Schauen wir jetzt, mit der Fackel dieses Gedankens, auf Sokrates hin: so erscheint er uns als der Erste, der an der Hand jenes Instinctes der Wissenschaft nicht nur leben, sondern—was bei weitem mehr ist—auch sterben konnte: und deshalb ist das Bild des sterbenden Sokrates als des durch Wissen und Gründe der Todesfurcht enthobenen Menschen das Wappenschild, das über dem Eingangsthor der Wissenschaft einen Jeden an deren Bestimmung erinnert, nämlich das Dasein als begreiflich und damit als gerechtfertigt erscheinen zu machen: wozu freilich wenn die Gründe nicht reichen, schliesslich auch der Mythus dienen muss, den ich sogar als nothwendige Consequenz, ja als Absicht der Wissenschaft soeben bezeichnete.
Wer sich einmal anschaulich macht, wie nach Sokrates, dem Mystagogen der Wissenschaft, eine Philosophenschule nach der anderen, wie Welle auf Welle, sich ablöst, wie eine nie geahnte Universalität der Wissensgier in dem weitesten Bereich der gebildeten Welt und als eigentliche Aufgabe für jeden höher Befähigten die Wissenschaft auf die hohe See führte, von der sie niemals seitdem wieder völlig vertrieben werden konnte, wie durch diese Universalität erst ein gemeinsames Netz des Gedankens über den gesammten Erdball, ja mit Ausblicken auf die Gesetzlichkeit eines ganzen Sonnensystems, gespannt wurde; wer dies Alles, sammt der erstaunlich hohen Wissenspyramide der Gegenwart, sich vergegenwärtigt, der kann sich nicht entbrechen, in Sokrates den einen Wendepunkt und Wirbel der sogenannten Weltgeschichte zu sehen. Denn dächte man sich einmal diese ganze unbezifferbare Summe von Kraft, die für jene Welttendenz verbraucht worden ist, nicht im Dienste des Erkennens, sondern auf die praktischen d.h. egoistischen Ziele der Individuen und Völker verwendet, so wäre wahrscheinlich in allgemeinen Vernichtungskämpfen und fortdauernden Völkerwanderungen die instinctive Lust zum Leben so abgeschwächt, dass, bei der Gewohnheit des Selbstmordes, der Einzelne vielleicht den letzten Rest von Pflichtgefühl empfinden müsste, wenn er, wie der Bewohner der Fidschiinseln, als Sohn seine Eltern, als Freund seinen Freund erdrosselt: ein praktischer Pessimismus, der selbst eine grausenhafte Ethik des Völkermordes aus Mitleid erzeugen könnte—der übrigens überall in der Welt vorhanden ist und vorhanden war, wo nicht die Kunst in irgend welchen Formen, besonders als Religion und Wissenschaft, zum Heilmittel und zur Abwehr jenes Pesthauchs erschienen ist.
Angesichts dieses praktischen Pessimismus ist Sokrates das Urbild des theoretischen Optimisten, der in dem bezeichneten Glauben an die Ergründlichkeit der Natur der Dinge dem Wissen und der Erkenntniss die Kraft einer Universalmedizin beilegt und im Irrthum das Uebel an sich begreift. In jene Gründe einzudringen und die wahre Erkenntniss vom Schein und vom Irrthum zu sondern, dünkte dem sokratischen Menschen der edelste, selbst der einzige wahrhaft menschliche Beruf zu sein: so wie jener Mechanismus der Begriffe, Urtheile und Schlüsse von Sokrates ab als höchste Bethätigung und bewunderungswürdigste Gabe der Natur über alle anderen Fähigkeiten geschätzt wurde. Selbst die erhabensten sittlichen Thaten, die Regungen des Mitleids, der Aufopferung, des Heroismus und jene schwer zu erringende Meeresstille der Seele, die der apollinische Grieche Sophrosyne nannte, wurden von Sokrates und seinen gleichgesinnten Nachfolgern bis auf die Gegenwart hin aus der Dialektik des Wissens abgeleitet und demgemäss als lehrbar bezeichnet. Wer die Lust einer sokratischen Erkenntniss an sich erfahren hat und spürt, wie diese, in immer weiteren Ringen, die ganze Welt der Erscheinungen zu umfassen sucht, der wird von da an keinen Stachel, der zum Dasein drängen könnte, heftiger empfinden als die Begierde, jene Eroberung zu vollenden und das Netz undurchdringbar fest zu spinnen. Einem so Gestimmten erscheint dann der platonische Sokrates als der Lehrer einer ganz neuen Form der „griechischen Heiterkeit“ und Daseinsseligkeit, welche sich in Handlungen zu entladen sucht und diese Entladung zumeist in maeeutischen und erziehenden Einwirkungen auf edle Jünglinge, zum Zweck der endlichen Erzeugung des Genius, finden wird.
Nun aber eilt die Wissenschaft, von ihrem kräftigen Wahne angespornt, unaufhaltsam bis zu ihren Grenzen, an denen ihr im Wesen der Logik verborgener Optimismus scheitert. Denn die Peripherie des Kreises der Wissenschaft hat unendlich viele Punkte, und während noch gar nicht abzusehen ist, wie jemals der Kreis völlig ausgemessen werden könnte, so trifft doch der edle und begabte Mensch, noch vor der Mitte seines Daseins und unvermeidlich, auf solche Grenzpunkte der Peripherie, wo er in das Unaufhellbare starrt. Wenn er hier zu seinem Schrecken sieht, wie die Logik sich an diesen Grenzen um sich selbst ringelt und endlich sich in den Schwanz beisst—da bricht die neue Form der Erkenntniss durch, die tragische Erkenntniss, die, um nur ertragen zu werden, als Schutz und Heilmittel die Kunst braucht.
Schauen wir, mit gestärkten und an den Griechen erlabten Augen, auf die höchsten Sphären derjenigen Welt, die uns umfluthet, so gewahren wir die in Sokrates vorbildlich erscheinende Gier der unersättlichen optimistischen Erkenntniss in tragische Resignation und Kunstbedürftigkeit umgeschlagen: während allerdings dieselbe Gier, auf ihren niederen Stufen, sich kunstfeindlich äussern und vornehmlich die dionysisch-tragische Kunst innerlich verabscheuen muss, wie dies an der Bekämpfung der aeschyleischen Tragödie durch den Sokratismus beispielsweise dargestellt wurde.
Hier nun klopfen wir, bewegten Gemüthes, an die Pforten der Gegenwart und Zukunft: wird jenes „Umschlagen“ zu immer neuen Configurationen des Genius und gerade des musiktreibenden Sokrates führen? Wird das über das Dasein gebreitete Netz der Kunst, sei es auch unter dem Namen der Religion oder der Wissenschaft, immer fester und zarter geflochten werden oder ist ihm bestimmt, unter dem ruhelos barbarischen Treiben und Wirbeln, das sich jetzt „die Gegenwart“ nennt, in Fetzen zu reissen?—Besorgt, doch nicht trostlos stehen wir eine kleine Weile bei Seite, als die Beschaulichen, denen es erlaubt ist, Zeugen jener ungeheuren Kämpfe und Uebergänge zu sein. Ach! Es ist der Zauber dieser Kämpfe, dass, wer sie schaut, sie auch kämpfen muss!
Musean translation
Complete machine-assisted Musean translation of the 1886 issue, with the Attempt at Self-Criticism and the Preface to Richard Wagner, made directly from the German of the Fritzsch Neue Ausgabe and read against its page images; reviewed against the German before publication.
In the spirit of these last questions, so full of presentiment, we must now say how the influence of Socrates has spread over posterity down to this very moment, indeed into all the future, like a shadow that grows ever longer in the evening sun; how it compels the creation of art anew, again and again—art, that is, in the already metaphysical, broadest and deepest sense—and, through its own infinity, guarantees the infinity of art as well.
Before this could be recognized, before the innermost dependence of all art on the Greeks—the Greeks from Homer to Socrates—had been convincingly demonstrated, we were bound to fare with these Greeks as the Athenians did with Socrates. Almost every age and stage of culture has at some point sought, in profound discontent, to free itself from the Greeks, because in their presence everything it had achieved for itself, everything seemingly wholly original and quite sincerely admired, suddenly seemed to lose color and life and shrink into a failed copy, even a caricature. And so heartfelt fury keeps breaking out afresh against that presumptuous little people who dared to brand everything not native to themselves as “barbaric” for all time. Who are they, we ask ourselves, who, although they have only an ephemeral historical splendor to show, only institutions of ludicrously narrow scope, only a dubious moral excellence, and are even marked by ugly vices, nonetheless claim the dignity and special standing among peoples that belong to genius amid the masses? Unfortunately, we have not been lucky enough to find the cup of hemlock that could simply dispose of such a being: all the poison generated by envy, slander, and fury was insufficient to annihilate that self-sufficient magnificence. And so we feel shame and fear before the Greeks—unless someone prizes truth above all else and therefore dares admit this truth as well: that the Greeks, as charioteers, hold our culture and every culture in their hands, but that almost always the chariots and horses are made of too inferior a substance, unworthy of the glory of their drivers, who then think it a joke to send such a team plunging into the abyss, while they themselves clear it with the leap of Achilles.
To establish the dignity of such leadership for Socrates too, it is enough to recognize in him the type of a form of existence unheard of before him: the type of the theoretical human being, whose meaning and aim it is our next task to understand. Like the artist, the theoretical person finds infinite satisfaction in what exists and, like the artist, is protected by that satisfaction against the practical ethics of pessimism and its Lynceus eyes, which shine only in the dark. For while the artist, whenever truth is unveiled, clings with rapturous gaze only to what remains a veil even now, after the unveiling, the theoretical person takes pleasure and satisfaction in the discarded veil, finding the highest object of delight in a process of unveiling that always succeeds happily through one’s own power. There would be no science if it cared for that one naked goddess and nothing else. For then its disciples would have to feel like people who wanted to dig a hole straight through the earth: each of them realizes that even with the greatest lifelong exertion he can dig through only a tiny stretch of that immense depth, which before his eyes is filled in again by his neighbor’s work, so that a third seems well advised to choose a new spot on his own for his attempts at boring. If someone now proves convincingly that this direct route cannot reach the goal at the antipodes, who would still want to keep working in the old depths, unless in the meantime he found satisfaction in discovering precious stones or laws of nature? That is why Lessing, the most honest theoretical person, dared to declare that he cared more for the search for truth than for truth itself: with this, the fundamental secret of science was laid bare, to the astonishment, indeed the annoyance, of its practitioners. Yet alongside this isolated insight, as an excess of honesty if not of high spirits, stands a profound delusional idea, which first came into the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, following the guiding thread of causality, reaches into the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical delusion is given to science as an instinct and leads it again and again to its limits, where it must turn into art: the real object toward which this mechanism is directed.
If we now look at Socrates by the torchlight of this thought, he appears to us as the first who, guided by that instinct of science, could not only live but—what is far more—also die. Thus the image of the dying Socrates, the human being freed from fear of death by knowledge and reasons, is the heraldic shield above the entrance gate of science, reminding everyone of its vocation: to make existence appear intelligible and thereby justified. For this purpose, of course, when reasons fail, myth too must ultimately serve—the very thing I have just described as a necessary consequence, indeed as the aim, of science.
Anyone who vividly imagines how, after Socrates, the initiator into the mysteries of science, one philosophical school succeeds another like wave upon wave; how an undreamed-of universality of the thirst for knowledge, across the broadest reaches of the cultivated world and as the true task of everyone with superior gifts, carried science onto the high seas, from which it has never since been wholly driven back; how only through this universality was a common web of thought stretched over the entire globe, indeed with vistas onto the lawful order of a whole solar system—anyone who brings all this before his mind, together with the astonishingly lofty pyramid of knowledge in the present, cannot help seeing in Socrates the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history. For if we imagined this entire incalculable sum of energy expended on that world tendency being used not in the service of knowledge but for the practical—that is, egoistic—aims of individuals and peoples, then general wars of annihilation and continual migrations of peoples would probably have so weakened the instinctive joy in living that, with suicide a habit, an individual might feel a final remnant of duty when, like an inhabitant of the Fiji Islands, he strangled his parents as their son, or his friend as a friend. This would be a practical pessimism that could even produce a horrifying ethics of genocide out of pity—a pessimism that, incidentally, exists and has existed everywhere in the world where art in some form, especially as religion and science, has not appeared as a remedy and defense against that pestilential breath.
In the face of this practical pessimism, Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who, through the faith already described in the fathomability of the nature of things, credits knowledge and insight with the power of a universal medicine and sees error as evil in itself. To penetrate those depths and distinguish true knowledge from semblance and error seemed to the Socratic person the noblest, indeed the only truly human vocation, just as, from Socrates onward, that mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences was valued above all other faculties as nature’s highest activity and most admirable gift. Even the most sublime moral deeds, the impulses of pity, self-sacrifice, and heroism, and that hard-won sea-calm of the soul which the Apollonian Greek called sophrosyne, were derived by Socrates and his like-minded successors down to the present from the dialectic of knowledge, and accordingly declared teachable. Anyone who has experienced the pleasure of a Socratic insight and feels how, in ever-widening circles, it seeks to embrace the entire world of appearances will from then on feel no more powerful spur toward existence than the desire to complete that conquest and weave the net so tightly that nothing can pass through it. To someone disposed in this way, the Platonic Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of “Greek cheerfulness” and bliss in existence, which seeks to discharge itself in action and will chiefly find that discharge in maieutic and educative influence on noble youths, with the aim of finally begetting genius.
But now science, spurred by its powerful delusion, hastens irresistibly toward its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic founders. For the circumference of the circle of science has infinitely many points, and while it is still impossible to see how that circle could ever be completely measured out, the noble and gifted person inevitably encounters, even before the midpoint of life, such boundary points on the circumference, where he stares into what cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees here how logic coils around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which needs art as protection and remedy merely to be endured.
If, with eyes strengthened and refreshed by the Greeks, we look upon the highest spheres of the world that washes around us, we perceive the insatiable thirst for optimistic knowledge, exemplified in Socrates, transformed into tragic resignation and a need for art. On its lower levels, however, that same thirst must express itself in hostility to art, and inwardly abhor Dionysian-tragic art above all, as was shown, for example, in the account of Socratism’s battle against Aeschylean tragedy.
Here, then, with stirred hearts, we knock at the gates of the present and future: will that “transformation” lead to ever-new configurations of genius, and precisely of the music-practicing Socrates? Will the net of art spread over existence, even under the name of religion or science, be woven ever more firmly and delicately, or is it destined to be torn to shreds by the restlessly barbaric activity and turmoil that now calls itself “the present”?—Anxious but not without consolation, we stand aside for a little while as contemplative observers permitted to witness those tremendous struggles and transitions. Ah! The spell of these struggles is that whoever beholds them must also fight them!
Plain English translation
Complete machine-assisted Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the same German text, without reference to the Musean edition or to any English translation.
Following these last questions and their intimations, we must now say how Socrates’ influence has spread over later generations, right up to this moment and indeed into the whole future. It is like a shadow that keeps growing in the evening sun. We must say how this influence repeatedly forces the creation of art anew—art in its widest and deepest, already metaphysical sense—and how, being endless itself, it guarantees that art too will be endless.
Before we could recognize this, before the innermost dependence of all art on the Greeks, the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, had been convincingly demonstrated, our experience of these Greeks had to resemble the Athenians’ experience of Socrates. Almost every age and level of culture has at some point tried, in deep frustration, to free itself from the Greeks. In their presence, everything people themselves had achieved, everything seemingly completely original and sincerely admired, suddenly seemed to lose its color and life. It shrank into a failed copy, even a caricature. So time and again heartfelt rage breaks out against that presumptuous little people who dared to call everything foreign “barbaric” for all time. Who are these people, we ask, who can show only a brief historical splendor, institutions with a ridiculously limited scope, and a questionable moral worth, and who are even marked by ugly vices? Yet they claim the dignity and special position among nations that genius holds among the masses. Unfortunately, people have not been lucky enough to find a cup of hemlock with which such a being could simply be disposed of. All the poison that envy, slander, and rage produced was not enough to destroy that self-sufficient magnificence. So people feel ashamed and afraid before the Greeks—unless someone prizes truth above everything and therefore dares to admit this truth too: the Greeks hold the reins of our culture and every culture. But almost always, chariot and horses are made of inferior material, unworthy of their drivers’ glory. The drivers then think it a joke to send such a team plunging into the abyss, which they themselves clear with Achilles’ leap.
To show that Socrates too deserves the dignity of such leadership, we need only recognize in him the model of a way of existing unknown before him: the model of the theoretical person. Our next task is to understand this person’s meaning and goal. Like the artist, the theoretical person takes endless satisfaction in what exists. This satisfaction protects both of them against the practical ethics of pessimism and its eyes of Lynceus, which shine only in the dark. Whenever truth is unveiled, the artist gazes in delight only at what still remains a covering even after the unveiling. The theoretical person, by contrast, enjoys and takes satisfaction in the discarded covering. The greatest pleasure this person seeks is the process of unveiling, always happily succeeding through one’s own efforts. Science would not exist if its concern were only with that one naked goddess and nothing else. For then its followers would feel like people trying to dig a hole straight through the earth. Each sees that even with the greatest effort, lasting a lifetime, he can dig through only a tiny part of its enormous depth. Before his eyes, the next person’s work fills that part back in. A third person therefore seems sensible in choosing, on his own initiative, a new spot for his drilling attempts. Now suppose someone convincingly proves that this direct route cannot reach the goal on the opposite side of the earth. Who would still want to go on working in those old depths, unless meanwhile he had learned to find satisfaction in discovering precious stones or laws of nature? That is why Lessing, the most honest theoretical person, dared to say that searching for truth mattered more to him than truth itself. This revealed the fundamental secret of science, to the astonishment and even annoyance of scientific people. Admittedly, beside this isolated insight, this excess of honesty if not high spirits, stands a profound delusion that first entered the world in the person of Socrates. It is the unshakable belief that thought, guided by causality, reaches into the deepest abysses of being, and that thought can not only know being but even correct it. This sublime metaphysical delusion accompanies science as an instinct. Again and again it leads science to its limits, where it must turn into art—the real goal of this mechanism.
Now let us look at Socrates by the torchlight of this idea. He appears as the first person who, led by this scientific instinct, could not only live but—far more important—also die. That is why the image of the dying Socrates, the man whom knowledge and reasoning have freed from the fear of death, is the coat of arms above the entrance to science. It reminds everyone of science’s purpose: to make existence appear understandable and therefore justified. Of course, when reasoning is not enough, myth must ultimately serve this purpose too. I have just described myth as a necessary consequence, indeed as the aim, of science.
Think of Socrates as the initiator into the mysteries of science. After him, one school of philosophy replaces another, like wave following wave. An unimagined universality of the desire for knowledge spreads through the broadest reaches of the educated world. Regarded as the proper task of everyone with higher abilities, science is carried out onto the open sea, from which it has never since been completely driven back. Only through this universality was a shared net of thought stretched over the whole globe, even opening views onto the laws of an entire solar system. Anyone who pictures all this, along with today’s astonishingly high pyramid of knowledge, cannot help seeing Socrates as the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history. Imagine that this whole incalculable amount of energy spent on that worldwide tendency had not served knowledge. Suppose it had been used for the practical—that is, selfish—goals of individuals and peoples instead. General wars of annihilation and continual migrations of peoples would probably have weakened the instinctive joy in living so much that suicide would have become customary. An individual might then feel his last remnant of duty when, like an inhabitant of the Fiji Islands, he strangled his parents as their son, or his friend as a friend. This would be a practical pessimism that could even produce a horrifying ethic of genocide out of pity. Such pessimism, moreover, exists and has existed everywhere in the world where art in some form, especially as religion and science, has not appeared as a remedy and defense against that pestilential breath.
Against this practical pessimism, Socrates is the original model of the theoretical optimist. With the belief just described that the nature of things can be fully understood, this optimist gives knowledge and understanding the power of a universal medicine and sees error as evil itself. To penetrate those underlying reasons and separate true knowledge from semblance and error seemed to the Socratic person the noblest, indeed the only truly human calling. Similarly, from Socrates onward, the mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences was valued above all other abilities as nature’s highest activity and most admirable gift. Even the most sublime moral actions, impulses of compassion, self-sacrifice, and heroism, and that hard-won ocean calm of the soul that the Apollonian Greek called self-restraint, were derived by Socrates and his like-minded successors, down to the present day, from the dialectic of knowledge. Accordingly, they declared these things teachable. Anyone who has personally experienced the pleasure of Socratic knowledge, and feels how it tries in ever-widening circles to embrace the whole world of appearances, will thereafter feel no stronger spur toward existence than the desire to complete that conquest and weave the net so firmly that nothing can penetrate it. To someone in this state of mind, Plato’s Socrates appears as the teacher of a completely new form of “Greek cheerfulness” and happiness in existence. This seeks an outlet in action. It will generally find that outlet in drawing ideas out of noble young men and educating them, with the ultimate aim of producing genius.
But now science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, rushes unstoppably to its limits. There the optimism hidden in the nature of logic breaks down. For the circumference of the circle of science has infinitely many points. We still cannot even see how the circle could ever be completely measured. Yet a noble and gifted person inevitably reaches such boundary points on the circumference, even before the midpoint of life, and stares into what cannot be illuminated. Here, to his horror, he sees logic coil around itself at these limits and finally bite its own tail. Then a new form of knowledge breaks through: tragic knowledge. Simply to be bearable, it needs art as a protection and remedy.
With eyes strengthened and refreshed by the Greeks, let us look at the highest spheres of the world surrounding us. We see the hunger for insatiable, optimistic knowledge, exemplified in Socrates, turn into tragic resignation and a need for art. At its lower levels, however, that same hunger must express hostility to art and inwardly detest Dionysian, tragic art above all. The struggle of Socratism against Aeschylean tragedy, for example, has illustrated this.
Here, with moved hearts, we knock at the gates of the present and the future. Will that “turning” lead to ever-new forms of genius, and specifically to a Socrates who practices music? Will the net of art spread over existence, even under the names of religion or science, be woven ever more firmly and finely? Or is it destined to be torn to shreds amid the restlessly barbaric activity and turmoil that now calls itself “the present”? Worried but not without comfort, we stand aside for a little while as observers allowed to witness those enormous struggles and transitions. Ah! The spell of these struggles is that anyone who watches them must also fight them!
About this section
Section 15 is part of The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is section 23 of 33 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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