/lit/ - Literature

>>17773397
What do you think?

>>17773397
>>ruined the Dionysian element in Greek tragedy with Euripides
>>naively conflated the good with the conscious
>>"from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
>>literally got executed for his views
Literally all false, the degradation of tragedy was an historical a priori function, his understanding of philosophy was mystical and came from Pythagoreanism and Orphism, didn't believe in equality, and he couldn't have been executed for his views if they didn't understand them and falsely charged him.

>>17773397
The criticism of Socrates you make is a criticism only a nigger would do. That being said he is in fact dangerously overrated, but only because he immobilised being and rejected Heraclitus. I don't expect you to understand that since you are probably a Nietzsche reader and are afraid of trannies.

>>17773415
>the degradation of tragedy was an historical a priori function
Doesn't mean he wasn't a symptom of its decay.

>his understanding of philosophy was mystical and came from Pythagoreanism and Orphism
Doesn't mean he didn't naively conflate the good with the conscious.

>didn't believe in equality
Did argue in favor of equality of possessions though.

>he couldn't have been executed for his views if they didn't understand them and falsely charged him
Just because his views appeared to the Greeks as alien gibberish doesn't mean he wasn't executed for them. What do you think he was executed for, otherwise?

He was executed for being the most annoying guy around after the 30 tyrants, some of whom he was friends with.

Look, somebody just read Nietzsche! How fucking insightful you are.

>>17773512
t. diogenes

>>17773515
So you're not going to answer the question?

>>17773440
He didn't argue for equal anything. He argues that those who lead should willingly take lesser wages so that they are not in it for the profit.

>>17773397
The type of philosophy done by the Presocratics was already exhausted. They made several claims in direct contradiction with other and there didn't seem to be any way to resolve things. Then the Sophists came a long and not did they adopt relativism as a response to the Presocratics but they also moved the conversation away from nature to the ethical and political sphere.
The Socrates came along and changed the paradigm once again by pointing out that none of them were concerned with truth, only appearance and monetary gain, and were therefore not doing real philosophy at all.
Philosophy is really just a bunch of people responding to each other, but stretched out through generations.

>>17773397
>>ruined the Dionysian element in Greek tragedy with Euripides

>>17773570
The sophist Glaucon literally defined justice same as Thrasymachus except he also added as long as you APPEAR nice it’s all guuci

>Heidegger identifies Socrates as the “purest thinker of the West”, and it is this classification as a “pure thinker” that we are committed to unpacking as it relates to Socrates’ understanding and practice of his dialectic method, his view of “truth,” and his understanding of philosophy (or thinking) as a process of original learning (paideia). Socrates, in his ever-renewed quest for truth, observes Heidegger, is courageously “drawn to what withdraws,” and when this happens to a thinker in the process of authentically thinking, he is drawn into “the enigmatic and herefore mutable nearness of its appeal”, despite being “far away from what withdraws” and even though “the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever.” This, as we explain constitutes or instantiates for Heidegger the “living context” of thinking, a context facilitating the “draft” of the dynamic counter-striving of lighting and concealing, and Socrates, according to Heidegger, did “nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it,” and this is why, according to Heidegger he was the purest thinker of the West.


>Kiekegaard said ”The knowledge that he knew nothing is not at all the pure, empty nothing one usually takes it to be, but the nothingness of the determinate content of the world as it is. The knowledge of the negativity of all finite content is his wisdom, through which he is drawn into himself, and he expresses this exploration of his own inwardness as his absolute goal, as the beginning of infinite knowledge, yet merely the beginning since this consciousness has nowise been consummated but IS only the negation of everything established in a finite sense”. Also Kierkegaard wrote, “He admittedly freed the single individual from every presupposition, freed him as he himself was free”.
>“Instead of speculatively setting his negativity to rest, he set it far more to rest in the eternal unrest in which he repeated the same process with each single individual. In all this, however, that which makes him into a personality is precisely irony… Naturally this [Socrates’ claim of knowing nothing] conceals a polemic and dismays anyone who has found his repose in one or another finite relation to the divine”.

https://medium.com/@edwardliguori/kierkegaards-view-on-socrates-and-its-relevance-to-modernity-403bb3c1a66
https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_9433_cd416ca3cda1374115faa0a437a0729c.pdf

>>17773397
Cringe.
>>17773415
Based.
Nietzsche was a faggot who had no clue what he was talking about.

>>17773554
>He didn't argue for equal anything
He did until Glaucon raised suspicion, from which he then went on to argue in favor of luxury, but only as pretense for displaying how justice and injustice grow out of it.

>>17773655
He was talking about a small community there you dumb retard. The point is that if you want a larger state, you'll need hierarchy. Stop reading.

>>17773550
Socrates was more of a Dionysian than Nietzsche could ever larp as. He was considered the embodiment of Silenus.
He was also a Chad warrior

And yet I could not help wondering at his natural temperance and self-restraint and manliness. I never imagined that I could have met with a man such as he is in wisdom and endurance. And therefore I could not be angry with him or renounce his company, any more than I could hope to win him. For I well knew that if Ajax could not be wounded by steel, much less he by money; and my only chance of captivating him by my personal attractions had failed. So I was at my wit's end; no one was ever more hopelessly enslaved by another. All this happened before he and I went on the expedition to Potidaea; there we messed together, and I had the opportunity of observing his extraordinary power of sustaining fatigue. His endurance was simply marvellous when, being cut off from our supplies, we were compelled to go without food—on such occasions, which often happen in time of war, he was superior not only to me but to everybody; there was no one to be compared to him. Yet at a festival he was the only person who had any real powers of enjoyment; though not willing to drink, he could if compelled beat us all at that,—wonderful to relate! no human being had ever seen Socrates drunk; and his powers, if I am not mistaken, will be tested before long. His fortitude in enduring cold was also surprising. There was a severe frost, for the winter in that region is really tremendous, and everybody else either remained indoors, or if they went out had on an amazing quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet swathed in felt and fleeces: in the midst of this, Socrates with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordinary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and they looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them.

>>17773688
you're wrong and the other anon is right. socrates's ideal state would have been practical and rustic until glaucon interceded and socrates obviously got a chuckle out of that.

>>17773688
The point is that Socrates talked more about justice than about hierarchy and desired the former more than the latter.

>>17773705
You were filtered by philosophy

>>17773692
I have told you one tale, and now I must tell you another, which is worth hearing,

'Of the doings and sufferings of the enduring man'

while he was on the expedition. One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon—there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this was not in winter but in summer), brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way (compare supra). I will also tell, if you please—and indeed I am bound to tell—of his courage in battle; for who but he saved my life? Now this was the engagement in which I received the prize of valour: for I was wounded and he would not leave me, but he rescued me and my arms; and he ought to have received the prize of valour which the generals wanted to confer on me partly on account of my rank, and I told them so, (this, again, Socrates will not impeach or deny), but he was more eager than the generals that I and not he should have the prize.

>>17773723
There was another occasion on which his behaviour was very remarkable—in the flight of the army after the battle of Delium, where he served among the heavy-armed,—I had a better opportunity of seeing him than at Potidaea, for I was myself on horseback, and therefore comparatively out of danger. He and Laches were retreating, for the troops were in flight, and I met them and told them not to be discouraged, and promised to remain with them; and there you might see him, Aristophanes, as you describe (Aristoph. Clouds), just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalking like a pelican, and rolling his eyes, calmly contemplating enemies as well as friends, and making very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance, that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stout resistance; and in this way he and his companion escaped—for this is the sort of man who is never touched in war; those only are pursued who are running away headlong. I particularly observed how superior he was to Laches in presence of mind. Many are the marvels which I might narrate in praise of Socrates; most of his ways might perhaps be paralleled in another man, but his absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has been is perfectly astonishing. You may imagine Brasidas and others to have been like Achilles; or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor to have been like Pericles; and the same may be said of other famous men, but of this strange being you will never be able to find any likeness, however remote, either among men who now are or who ever have been—other than that which I have already suggested of Silenus and the satyrs; and they represent in a figure not only himself, but his words. For, although I forgot to mention this to you before, his words are like the images of Silenus which open; they are ridiculous when you first hear them; he clothes himself in language that is like the skin of the wanton satyr—for his talk is of pack-asses and smiths and cobblers and curriers, and he is always repeating the same things in the same words (compare Gorg.), so that any ignorant or inexperienced person might feel disposed to laugh at him; but he who opens the bust and sees what is within will find that they are the only words which have a meaning in them, and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and honourable man.

>>17773692
This, literally everybody who knew him personally said he was an Ubermensch.

>greatest warrior in the Athenian army at the time
>turned down the ability to be a famous general so his friend could get the award
>charismatic leader of the youth
>nigh unparalleled philosophical genius and effect on the world

>>17773692
>Silenus
Wasn't he an antinatalist?

>>17773692
>Socrates was more of a Dionysian than Nietzsche
>starts quoting Plato's glorification of him as an "argument"
I'm guessing you don't even know what arguments Nietzsche made against Socrates. How he and Euripides made a mockery of the tragic chorus?

>>17773397
Literally none of the things you say is true. If you want to learn about socrates, read Plato and Xenophon, not Nietzsche.

>>17773776
I do not recall Socrates talking about Euripides in any of the dialogues.

>>17773788
Then read Wagner, which is basically the same thing as The Birth of Tragedy except without blaming Socrates.

>>17773814
>Wagner
Christcuck

>>17773440
>Doesn't mean he wasn't a symptom of its decay
If he was a symptom, he wasn't a cause

>conflate the good with the conscious
Socrates never did this. Point me to a text where someone reports him doing that.

>Did argue in favor of equality of possessions though.
Plato did that in the Republic, and even if you assume that Socrates is Socrates and not Plato's spokesman in there, the Republic is literally a text where he structures society in a hierarchy because some people are by nature better than others. Also, the lower classes are allowed possessions.

>Just because his views appeared to the Greeks as alien gibberish doesn't mean he wasn't executed for them. What do you think he was executed for, otherwise?
Other people held his views before him and weren't executed. He was executed for angering the wrong person at the wrong time, namely, at a time where Athen needed political stability and consolidated it around religious belief. Only for this reason it was possible to accuse him of empiety. Even then, almost half of the council voted for him to be released. And after that vote, they still left the door of his cell open to allow him to escape. Literally no one except for his accuser thought he deserved death. Some thought he deserved exile, and left that opportunity opened. But given all this, I don't know how you can take a specific vote in a specific historic time in the context of a specific process in a specific greek polis as representative of something so general as "the Greeks", except because you have read Nietzsche and no Greeks and are too retarted to contextualize any of his blatantly wrong generalizations.

>>17773825
>this is your average Nietzsche reader

>>17773436
He didn't reject heraclitus and didn't immobilize being. Read the Parmenides, read the Cratylus, read the Sophist.

>>17773776
>If you want to learn about socrates, read the guy who propagandized his life

>>17773766
>be euripedes
>write best tragedy
>literally dionysus the play
>celebrated forever

>be neetch
>C-C-CONSEQUENT-QUENTLY EU-YU-(YOU)-EURIPIDES DID NOT UN-U-UN-UNDERST-STAND THTHETHE G-G-GREEKS
>B-B-BBECAUSE TH-THE GG-G-GREEKS DID N-NOT UN-UNDERSTAND THTHE G-G-GREEKS
>be worshipped by redditors trying to retain their edge

>>17773854
I forgot Aristophanes. These are three names of people who knew him directly. You either read those or you read reports of people who never knew him. Do you have any text you think is more accurate than anything from Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes?

>>17773788
>if you want to understand socrates...
>they don't talk about euripides
The absolute state of neetch logic

>>17773852
Based, finally someone who actually understands Plato.

>>17773788
Because you haven't read them. Plato's Gorgias is full of quotes from Euripides, and they are major parts of the arguments proposed

>>17773814
This.

>But a positive proof of the Greek Tragic-poets' aim, both as to content and form, is afforded by the whole progress of their dramas; which unquestionably move from the lap of the Lyric to an intellectual Reflection, just as the Song of the chorus embouches into the merely spoken iambic Talk of the characters. What sets the working of these dramas in so enthralling a light for us, however, is precisely the Lyric element preserved in them, and recurring more strongly in their crises; that Lyric element which the poet employed with full and deliberate consciousness, exactly as the Didacticist who delivered his educational poems to youth in school, in the stirring strains of lyric song. Yet a deeper look will shew us that the Tragic poet was less open and honest of aim when he clothed it in the lyric garb, than where he undisguisedly expressed it in the merely spoken dialogue: and in this didactic probity, but artistic disingenuousness, there lies the downfall of Greek Tragedy; for the Folk soon noticed that it did not want instinctively to move their Feeling, but arbitrarily to rule their Understanding. Euripides had to shed blood beneath [284] the lash of Aristophaneian ridicule, for this open blurting of the lie. That the more and more deliberately didactic poetry must next become the practised rhetoric of the forum (zur staatspraktischen Rhetorik), and at last the downright prose of literature, was the extreme, but altogether natural consequence of the evolution of Understanding out of Feeling, and—for artistic Expression—of Word-speech out of Melody.
- Opera and Drama

Horrible translation, but is shows how much Nietzsche got from Wagner.

>>17773889
His contemporaries only show a fifth century view of him. Nietzsche successfully captures the sixth century's view of him, which was at odds with the fifth. Not reading and considering the weight of all viewpoints makes you a philistine.

>>17773852
>Parmenides
read
>Cratylus
read
>Sophist
read
read Heraclitus.

>>17773958
>Nietzsche successfully captures the sixth century view of him
Point me to a text of the sixth century which has the view you propose. Nietzsche was universally disregarded as a philologist by the whole academic community of his days, and the opinion of most people who study classics hasn't change on him. He was a great philosopher but a terrible historian.
So what GREEK text should I read that confirms your vision of Socrates?

>>17773959
If you actually read those you'd know Plato wasn't rejecting Heraclitus.

>>17773958
He was born in 470 BC, how would the sixth century have had an opinion on him?

>>17773973
>Point me to a text of the sixth century which has the view you propose.
Aeschylus' plays contain a very different understanding of the Dionysian theater inherited from the sixth century's views and Nietzsche lays this out for us in The Birth of Tragedy. This is relevant because he establishes a direct connection between Euripides' tragedy and Socrates' philosophy and analyzes how Euripides' tragedy was at odds with Aeschylus'.

>>17773959
read. Assuming you take the viewpoint of those dialogues to be Socrates', you can see from the Cratylus and the Timaeus that his (or more likely Plato's) vision of the sensible world is essentially that of an heraclitean flux with alternation of opposites (also check the cyclical argument of the Phaedo, where he states this openly).

As for immobilizing being, in the Sophist he literally "kills" the parmenidean claim that "is not" = "does not exist" and distinguishes the copulative and the existential meaning of being for the first time in philosophy. So, if anything, he helped doing the exact opposite. Plus, he says that even if being is being in the Parmenidean sense (immoble and unchangeable), it still must admit some degree of change because, because, when being is know, it is submitted to the action of being known, which means that it is different from how it was before. I don't think I need to add more on the Parmenides at this point.

>>17773958
>sixth century view on someone who wasn't even born at that point
You must be retarded

>>17774004
>>17774045
"sixth century's view of him" as in what the greatest minds of the sixth century would have thought of him, you autists.

>>17774018
the fact that your only source here is Nietzsche by itself is sufficient to dismiss everything you say. In order to do defend his point, you need to show:

>That Aeschylus proposes a coherent view of what you call the Dyonisian, which you can do only from doing literary interpretation of 3 of over the 70 to 90 plays attributed to him
>That Eurypides presents a radically different view of the world, always through literary criticism of a handful of the many plays he wrote
>That starting from this embarassingly tiny corpus of evidence you can prove not only that these are views you can attribute to THE GREEKS as a whole
>That Socrates agreed with Euripides and was at odds with Aeschylus

I assume you cant' do any of this in a 4chan thread so I am just going to ask you how do you think Euripides is at odds with Aeschylus and hos does he agree with Socrates, in your (Nietzsche's) opinion.

>>17774029
>sensible world
that's what's essential though
also, and I must admit this comes from my personal reading of Heraclitus, one of the most essential fragment is "τῷ οὖν τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος" (more or less: "the name of the bow is life, but its work is death), something that I just cannot see in Plato's dialogues (or maybe in of those I have not read), the notion of φύσις as shown by Reinhardt (and more famously Heidegger) is also a good instance of that
obviously there is not a complete rejection of Heraclitus by Socrates/Plato but rather a slight change of paradigm that corrupt Heraclitus' thought
also sorry if I'm not really making sense rn I'm very drunk, I'll reread all of that tomorrow if the thread is still up
also if you like Heraclitus read René Char

>>17774087
>early objectivists would dislike the guy who turned Athens from subjective money-oriented rhetoric back to philosophy
Half the shit Socrates says he got from the Presocratics.

>>17773736
>>17773723
>>17773692
Insanely based.

>>17774087
Man you are defending a 1872 book by a crazy german as if it was an accurate representation of Greek thought as if the last 140 years of scholarship on the classics never happened and without bothering to read the original sources: what kind of reaction were you expecting?

>>17774110
>your only source here is Nietzsche
And? This doesn't mean he's wrong. This is basically an appeal to authority that you're pressing against me, which doesn't make for a valid argument.

>In order to do defend his point, you need to show [...]
The Birth of Tragedy provides these details. He makes an analysis of the plays, the conclusion of which was that Euripides did not understand Aeschylus (partly due to Sophocles, who first initiated the decline of the function of the chorus in tragedy), sought to find an audience who shared this sentiment, and therefore made Socrates his target audience. A large part of his analysis is in interpreting the various ways the chorus was utilized in tragedy.

The real point of the matter and the thread is that no one is right absolutely but the fifth century's view of tragedy (namely Socrates) had been taken to be right absolutely and dominated to the point where the sixth century's view was no longer considered at all. Nietzsche introduces these considerations back into academia with his analysis of the plays and the poets themselves.

>>17774196
Nietzsche never introduced any of these distinctions in academia because his book has been dismissed by his contemporaries (Wilamowitz) as much as it is by ours. Philosohpically speaking it is an interesting book, and it is amazingly well written, but it is a terrible book in terms of history of thought.

And I didn't just appeal to authority: I presented to you a series of methodological objections to Nietzsche's book. He makes incredibly large generalizations starting from the matter of tragedy alone, which is very little: that is bad historical inquiry. If you take Kerenyi's book on Dyonisus, there, to talk about the "Dyonisian", he discusses all written sources he could find PLUS the material archeological cultures (statues, painting on vases, etc.). That is how you make good research. You cant' take a handful of tragedies as representative of tendencies in the whole Greek thought. So you absolutely cannot say that there is a sixth century shared view on a fifth century shared view (which wasn't even there!) starting from a handful of tragedies alone. He simply does not offer nearly enough evidence for his thesis, which is exactly the criticism he received from Wilamowitz, who called the book "disdainful of proof", and the criticism it has received ever since in terms of historical accuracy.
That said, I love the Birth of Tragedy as an explanation of two opposed psychological views on life. I just think that the work of tracing those in Greek culture has been done very poorly, for the reasons above.

>>17773415
>an historical
Any last words, faggot?

>>17774366
I said "a" after historical so to not be clunky in my use of words and repetitive, I opted for "an".

>>17773397
If philosophy is a religion, he is the founding prophet

>>17773397
>>ruined the Dionysian element in Greek tragedy
This would've been a good thing if it were true.
>>naively conflated the good with the conscious
Nothing to say against that
>>"from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
Do you realise how forward-thinking this is for his time?
>>literally got executed for his views
Are you jealous because you're too cowardly to have that honour?

>>17774292
>Wilamowitz
Rohde pointed out that he inaccurately cited the book. There has also been further scholarship on the book and the tragedies since Nietzsche's time. Where do you get this idea that Nietzsche didn't introduce a new discourse on the tragedies into academia?

>Philosohpically speaking it is an interesting book, and it is amazingly well written, but it is a terrible book in terms of history of thought.
This doesn't make sense. The genealogical study of philosophy ties directly into the study of history. If his historical analysis is wrong, so would the philosophical analysis.

>He makes incredibly large generalizations starting from the matter of tragedy alone, which is very little: that is bad historical inquiry.
That is as good as one is going to get given A) the time period in which he wrote it and B) the subject matter which mostly pertains to a period in history with few surviving sources (and which possibly just didn't keep many scholarly records). This still doesn't address Nietzsche's analysis and arguments either; generalizations aren't necessarily historically inaccurate, and if certain accusations don't directly pertain to a historical individual, they may as well pertain to other historical individuals who associated with the former individual and are part of the former's historical influence.

>You cant' take a handful of tragedies as representative of tendencies in the whole Greek thought.
Then historical study can't be conducted at all, since it all amounts to generalizations, using individuals and accounts as conduits and psychological profiles of certain ages and cultures.

>That said, I love the Birth of Tragedy as an explanation of two opposed psychological views on life. I just think that the work of tracing those in Greek culture has been done very poorly, for the reasons above.
Well, do you have some other works to refer to other than Wilamowitz?

>>17773397
Imagine being a 14 year old Greek catamite boy with that ruddy, pig-faced monstrosity huffing and puffing and groaning over your prostrate, helpless body.

>>17773397
>a hero
more like an hero