Nietzsche and Simon Critchley on The Tragic Perspective

(The following was originally released as podcast episode #212 on September 22, 2024. Minor edits for clarity. Hope you enjoy! <3)

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

If you’re someone who’s intrigued by this story that Nietzsche’s telling of him smashing the idols from the history of western thought with a hammer...

Then real quick— can we just take a second to appreciate what Socrates looks like from Nietzsche’s perspective if he’s right here?

Not saying that he is right, but consider what this all looks like. Think of his whole game.

Like we talked about last time: Socrates effectively denies the whole Dionysian side of what reality is—the chaos, the passions, the emergent, context-dependent side of reality—and a big part of his approach is to steer as hard as he can into the Apollonian side of things: using reason to create a harmonious order to our understanding of the world.

It’s no secret how influential this approach has been on events in philosophy after the time of Socrates.

But again think about what he’s effectively doing here from the perspective of someone like Nietzsche.

Socrates says: my little game that we’re going to play today is— you can only use rationality, but you got to try to nail down the truth about everything in full.

Using only reason try to give me the ultimate definitions of everything in the world around you!

So then this guy goes out into the public square, and starts harassing people to play this game with him:

Hey uh, you over there, you think you’re wise?

Well then why don’t you give me a perfect definition of what justice is? Tell me in simple, rational terms what justice truly is—it’s a very easy question!

Then you give him a definition of justice. He picks it apart. Points out the limitations of it. He says that can’t be all of what justice is.

So you give ‘em another definition, he picks it apart again, he’s like look: I can keep doing this all day, you guys just keep making these basic mistakes. I mean eventually you’re all gonna have to realize that the Oracle was probably right about me! I am the wisest one of all, because I can at least admit that I don’t know anything! God bless ya though kids, thanks for coming out—you tried hard.

But