It is well-known that Nietzsche hated Socrates—there is a whole chapter in Twilight of the Idols, one of Nietzsche’s books, about this, called “The Problem of Socrates.” In this chapter, Nietzsche calls Socrates, among other things, ugly, and questions whether Socrates was even a real Greek. He says that Socrates is anti-Greek, and represents the decay and decline of the greatness of ancient Greek culture. He uses Socrates’ ugliness as an argument against his entire philosophy—that an ugly person must have an ugly philosophy, ugly on the outside, ugly on the inside: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo.
Nietzsche then focuses on dialectics, the core of Socrates’ philosophy, and indeed of his whole being. Nietzsche sees dialectics as embodying everything about Socrates—and also embodying everything about degeneration:
“With Socrates Greek taste undergoes a change in favor of dialectics: what is really happening when that happens? It is above all the defeat of a nobler taste; with dialectics the rabble gets on top. Before Socrates, the dialectical manner was repudiated in good society: it was regarded as a form of bad manners…”
Nietzsche is very clear here—he views dialectics as plebeian, poor, unrefined, ignoble, low, impoverished. There is nothing aristocratic or godlike about dialectics, for Nietzsche. But is he right about this?
Socrates, of course, loved dialectics; and his defense of it is so much the exact opposite of Nietzsche’s critique, that it’s worth juxtaposing it here. In one of Plato’s later dialogues, the Philebus, Socrates says this of dialectics: “For everything in any field of art that has ever been discovered has come to light because of this…It is a gift of the gods to men, or so it seems to me, hurled down from heaven…”
Socrates describes dialectics as the gift of the gods— literally a way of bringing ultimate knowledge from heaven into our world. It is a way of elevating humanity to the level of gods—it is hard to imagine a nobler, loftier thing than this! And yet Nietzsche calls dialectics low, bad manners, something the rabble does.
The distinction here could not be starker—is dialectics something low or something high? Is it petty or noble? Is it wormlike or godlike?
What are Socrates’ reasons for thinking dialectics is so powerful? He gives an example of the god (or “god-inspired man” as Socrates calls him) of writing and intellect, Thoth (who lived roughly the same time as Moses—another “god or god-inspired man); perhaps prophet is the better term). Thoth was credited with dividing speech up into language—an achievement that Socrates sees as being done through dialectics. He discovered that vocal sound could be divided into vowels, and then consonants; and these turned into letters of the alphabet, which limited vocal sound, but also gave mankind unlimited powers of speech: vocal sound became limited down into letters, which then gave us the unlimited ability to express any internal state.
This is the process of dialectics, par excellence—starting with a unity (vocal sound), and then taking it apart to discover plurality within it (vowels, and consonants, then letters); and finally putting this back together into a unity, of the art of literacy. Unity—plurality—new unity. And this process was not just an intellectual one—it was creative, materially useful, and boosted mankind to a higher level of power. We had language now, the ability to set down the constant flux of internal states in letters, which would last forever, preserving momentary thoughts, which could then be ordered into sentences, paragraphs, books…and knowledge could be passed down from generation to generation. What is more godlike, more elevated, more noble, than that?
And against all this, what is Nietzsche’s argument? That dialectics is low and not noble. Why? He doesn’t really explain—because explaining would not be noble, after all! He gives some hints though; here’s a sample of his insults of dialectics in the “Problem of Socrates” chapter of Twilight of the Idols: “One chooses dialectics only when one has no other expedient.” “Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion. It is indecent to display all one’s goods. What has first to have itself proved is of little value.” “Nothing is easier to expunge than the effect of a dialectician.” “Dialectics can only be a last-ditch weapon in the hands of those who have no other weapon left.”
And most of all, Nietzsche critiques wisdom itself, which dialectics ultimately serves: “Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?” Meaning, wisdom itself is anti-life, it has no place on earth, it represents the decline of mankind, rather than its elevation (as Socrates believes). This is why Nietzsche is, as is well-known, a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment; an enemy of rational inquiry.
So, for Nietzsche, dialectics is a last resort, dishonest, has little value; and it serves wisdom, which itself is a rotten, empty idol. But for Socrates, dialectics is the tool that the gods themselves have given mankind, so that we can attain some godlike wisdom, and all arts and sciences have been discovered this way—including language itself, the greatest of all discoveries.
Who is more convincing? What is the right view to have of the value of dialectics? To start, it says something that Nietzsche felt the need to attack Socrates and dialectics so savagely, 2,000 years after Socrates died—and contradicts his point about the effects of dialectics not lasting long; it has lasted 2,000 years! And it is at the root of so much evil and confusion, in Nietzsche’s view—how can such a low, weak thing have lasted so long and done so much damage…unless dialectics actually is a gift from the gods, as Socrates says…
And what would Nietzsche replace it with? What should we do instead of dialectics? How can we achieve knowledge? How will we make new discoveries? Does he offer any alternative? No—and this is why Nietzsche, despite his claims otherwise, is ultimately a nihilist; he seeks to destroy dialectics, and offers no alternative means for making discoveries in art and science. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s very little that’s really new in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Even though he is the philosopher par excellence of the modern age, and heralded a New World that was going to come after him, the postmodern world, and everything that goes along with it. And he predicted the decline of religiosity, and nearly everything else that came to define the postmodern condition. But the real core of his philosophy is the eternal return of the same, the idea that nothing new can happen—that is his metaphysical doctrine. His epistemological doctrine is something called perspectivism—that all we can do is change our perspective on the world; and so metaphysics and epistemology go together in this way, since all there is is the eternal return of the same, all we can do is view this old thing as if it were new, so nothing new can be discovered; all we can do is change our perspective on what exists, to make it appear new. Nietzsche often wrote of a transvaluation, but this is not the creation of new values, it’s seeing old values under a new perspective. Old values which had come to be seen as bad, should in fact be seen as good. Changing the way we relate to what already exists, rather than helping bring new things into existence.
Dialectics is defined by the belief that something new can be discovered—and this is precisely why Nietzsche hated it. And isn’t this the opposite of noble, just accepting the way things are, that nothing new can exist, and hoping that your slot in the overall picture is something you can adjust to?
I assume you have Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann. In chapter 13, there's a whole discussion on Nietzsche's attitude toward Socrates that Kaufmann describes as ambiguous. He quotes Oscar Wilde's "All Men Kill the Thing They Love..." as the starting point for thinking about how Nietzsche related to Socrates.
Kaufmann defends his view that Nietzsche admired Socrates all of his life. Even his last book, Ecce Homo, is salutatory toward Socrates.
I'll mention what jumped at me here rather than discussing all the details Kaufmann goes through. I find it odd that Nietzsche despised the dialectical method when so much of his writing is dialectic, i.e., Apollo vs Dionysus. My hunch is that Nietzsche despises how the dialectical method can be used to undermine all kinds of arguments without really getting to the truth. After all, for Nietzsche, there is no truth to discover. Socrates' question-and-answer method, at best, exposes ignorance rather than getting at the truth. All Socrates did was show how those know-it-alls in his time weren't that clever but quite ignorant. Nietzsche sees this as a way of avoiding taking risks yourself. The Socratic method doesn't inspire action; it illuminates how you might be wrong. One could get stuck forever deliberating the finer points, the very approach that Nietzsche abhorred of academic vivisectionists whose lives were completely unhistorical yet pored endlessly over minutia. Nietzsche is a gadfly to the German philosophy and culture of his time, but he profoundly resents being nothing more than just that.
On a personal note, I recall as a seventeen year old how I was a huge fan of Guns n Roses. At that time, I was moderately religious, so I had a hard time seeing Axl Rose perform with a t-shirt that read "Kill Your Idol" with Jesus' face on it. Of course, one might ask what a moderately religious person is doing listening to Guns n Roses. I wanted to rebel and found an outlet to express that rebellion. I was not prepared for the boundaries that rebellion pushes. A compartmentalised life is anathema to Nietzsche. Many religious people secretly love things that are proscribed and somehow live a life of duality. Nietzsche was constantly amazed at the saints who destroyed that duality but at the cost of a life-denying existence. And that's the problem with Socrates, it gives you this detached viewpoint without requiring commitment or risks. I imagine Nietzsche wanted his hero to give the Athenian court the middle finger and say if you want my life you're going to have to take it and then plan an escape and live dangerously. But to take the hemlock as he did, Nietzsche must have thought that to be so lame as to roll over and die. Where was the life-affirming defiance? That, I think, irked Nietzsche more than anything.