In the sense of this last mysterious question we must how state how the influence of Socrates has spread out over later worlds, right up to this moment and, indeed, into all future ages, like a shadow in the evening sun constantly growing larger, how that influence always makes necessary the re-creation of art — I mean art in its most profound and widest metaphysical sense — and through its own immortality guarantees the immortality of art.

Before we could recognize this fact, before we convincingly established the innermost dependence of every art on the Greeks, from Homer right up to Socrates, we had to treat these Greeks as the Athenians treated Socrates. Almost every era and cultural stage has at some point sought in an profoundly ill-tempered frame of mind to free itself of the Greeks, because in comparison with the Greeks, all their own achievements, apparently fully original and admired in all sincerity, suddenly appeared to lose their colour and life and shrivelled to unsuccessful copies, in fact, to caricatures.

And so a heartfelt inner anger always keeps breaking out again against that arrogant little nation which dared to designate for all time everything that was not produced in its own country as “barbaric.” Who were those Greeks, people asked themselves, who, although they had achieved only an ephemeral historical glitter, only ridiculously restricted institutions, only an ambiguous competence in morality, who could even be identified with hateful vices, yet who had nevertheless laid a claim to a dignity and a pre-eminent place among peoples, appropriate to a genius among the masses? Unfortunately people were not lucky enough to find the cup of hemlock which could easily do away with such a being, for all the poisons which envy, slander, and inner rage created were insufficient to destroy that self-satisfied magnificence.

Hence, confronted by the Greeks, people have been ashamed and afraid, unless an individual values the truth above everything else and dares to propose this truth: the notion that the Greeks, as the charioteers of our culture and every other one, hold the reins, but that almost always the wagon and horses are inferior material and do not match the glory of their drivers, who then consider it amusing to whip such a team into the abyss, over which they themselves jump with the leap of Achilles.1

To demonstrate that Socrates also merits such a place among the drivers of the chariot, it is sufficient to recognize him as typifying a form of existence inconceivable before him, the type known as the Theoretical Man. Our next task is to reach some insight about the meaning and purpose of such a man. The theoretical man, like the artist, also takes an infinite satisfaction in the present and is, like the artist, protected by that satisfaction from the practical ethic of pessimism and from its lynx eyes which glow only in the darkness. For while the artist, with each revelation of the truth, always keeps his enchanted gaze hanging on what still remains hidden after his revelation, theoretical man enjoys and remains satisfied with the covers which have been cast aside and takes as the greatest object of delight the process of continually happy unveiling which his own power has brought about.

There would be no science if it concerned itself only with that one naked goddess and with nothing else. For then its disciples would have to feel like people who wanted to dig a hole straight through the earth, and each of them sees that, even with the greatest lifelong effort, he is in a position to dig through only a really small piece of the immense depths, and that piece will be covered over in front of his eyes by the work of the person who comes after him, so that a third person would apparently do well to select on his own initiative a new place for his tunnelling efforts. Well, if someone now convincingly demonstrates that it is impossible to reach the antipodes by this direct route, who will still want to continue working on in the old depths, unless in the meantime he lets himself be satisfied with the possibility of finding some valuable rock or discovering some natural law? For that reason, Lessing, the most honest theoretical man, ventured to state that for him the search for the truth counted for more than truth itself. With that statement the fundamental secret of science, is unmasked, to the astonishment, indeed, the anger, of scientists. Now, of course, alongside occasional recognitions like Lessing’s, prompted by excessive honesty if not high spirits, stands a profound delusion, which first came into the world in the person of Socrates, the unshakeable faith that thinking, guided by the main idea of causality, might reach into the deepest abyss of being and that thinking is capable, not just of understanding being, but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical delusion is instinctually part of science and leads it over and over again to its limits, at which point it must turn into art, something which is really predictable with this mechanical process.

With the torch of this idea, let’s now look at Socrates: to us he appears as the first person who was capable not only of living by that instinct for science, but also — something much more — of dying by it, and thus the picture of the dying Socrates as a man raised above fear of death by knowledge and reason is the shield hanging over the entranceway to science, reminding every individual of his purpose, namely, to make existence intelligible and thus apparently justified. Of course, when reasoning cannot succeed in this endeavour, myth must also finally serve, something which I have just noted as the necessary consequence, indeed, even the purpose, of science.

Once anyone clearly sees how, after Socrates, that mystagogue of science, one philosophical school after another, like wave after wave, succeed each other, how a never-imagined universal greed for knowledge through the widest extent of the educated world steered science around on the high seas as the essential task for every person of greater capabilities, a greed which it has been impossible since then completely to expel from science, how through this universality a common net of thinking was cast over the entire earth for the first time, with prospects, in fact, of the rule-bound workings of an entire solar system — whoever reminds himself of all this, together with that astonishingly high pyramid of contemporary knowledge, cannot deny the fact that in Socrates we see a turning point and vortex of so-called world history.

Then imagine for a moment if the entire incalculable sum of the energy which has been used in pursuit of that world project were spent, not in the service of knowledge, but on the practical, that is, the egotistical, aims of individuals and peoples, then in all probability the instinctive delight in living would be so weakened by universal wars of destruction and continuing migrations of people that, with suicide
being a common occurrence, perhaps the individual would have had to feel the final remnant of a sense of duty, when he, like the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, as a son would strangle his parents, and as a friend would strangle his friend — a practical pessimism, which could even give rise to a dreadful ethic of mass murder out of sympathy — an ethic which, by the way, is present and has been present all over the world, wherever art has not appeared in some form or other, especially in religion and science, as a remedy and a defence against that miasma.

With respect to this practical pessimism, Socrates is the original picture of the theoretical optimist, who, as I have described, in the belief that we could come to understand the nature of things, thinks that the power of a universal medicine is contained in knowledge and discovery and that evil inherently consists of error. To push forward with that reasoning and to separate true knowledge from appearance and
from error seemed to the Socratic man the noblest, even the single truly human, vocation, and so from Socrates on, that mechanism of ideas, judgments, and conclusions has been valued as the highest activity and the most admirable gift of nature, above all other capabilities. Even the noblest moral deeds, the emotions of pity, of self-sacrifice, of heroism and that calmness in the soul, so difficult to attain, which the Apollonian Greeks called sophrosyne — all these were derived by Socrates and his like- minded descendants right up to the present time from the dialectic of knowledge and therefore described as teachable.

Whoever has experienced for himself the delight of a Socratic discovery and feels how this, in ever-widening circles, seeks to enclose the entire world of phenomena, will from then on find no spur capable of pushing him into existence more intense than the desire to complete that conquest and to weave a solid impenetrable net. To a man so minded, the Platonic Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of “Greek serenity” and of a blissful existence, which seeks to discharge itself in actions and which will find this discharge, for the most part, in those influences which come from acting as a midwife to and educating noble disciples, in order to produce an endless supply of genius.

But now science, incited by its powerful delusion, speeds on inexorably right to its limits, at which point the optimism hidden in the essence of logic breaks down. For the circumference of the circle of science has an infinity of points, and while it is still impossible to see how that circumference could ever be completely measured, nevertheless the noble, talented man, before the middle of his life, inevitably comes up against such a border point on that circumference, where he stares out into something which cannot be illuminated. When, at this point, he sees to his horror how at these limits logic turns around on itself and finally bites its own tail — then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic insight , which, in order merely to be endured, requires art as a protector and healer.
If we look at the loftiest realms of that world streaming around us, our eyes strengthened and refreshed by the Greeks, we become aware of that greed of insatiably optimistic knowledge, exemplary in Socrates, turning into tragic resignation and a need for art, even if it’s true that this same greed, at its lower levels, must express itself as hostile to art and must inwardly loathe Dionysian tragic art in particular, as I have already explained in the example of the conflict between Aeschylean tragedy and Socratism.

Here we are now knocking, with turbulent feelings, on the doors of the present and future: Will that “turning around” lead to continuously new configurations of genius and straight to the music-playing Socrates? Will that net of art spread out over existence, whether in the name of religion or of science, be woven always more tightly and delicately, or is it determined that it will be ripped to shreds by the restless barbaric impulses and hurly-burly which we now call “the present”? — We are standing here on the sidelines for a little while as lookers on, worried but not without hope, for we are being permitted to witness that immense struggle and transition. Alas! The magic of these battles is that whoever looks at them must also fight them!

Footnotes:

1Achilles : the principal character of Homer’s Iliad, is the pre-eminent warrior hero of Greek culture.