Socrates vs. Nietzsche: Morality and the Concept of Man
Socrates vs. Nietzsche: Morality
Moral of Socratic Morality and Nietzsche: Socrates is the target of Nietzsche’s critique on the topic of morality.
Similarities: The philosophy of Socrates is a reflection on ethical values, seeking a definition of them against the relativism of the Sophists. Nietzsche’s most profound and systematic critique of Western culture is the critique of morality and moral values. Morality is one of the roots of illness and decline in modern culture.
Differences:
A) Nietzsche is the antithesis of Socrates. Socrates is the great corruptor. With him triumphs the theoretical man “over the tragic man.” The ugly Socrates is the originator and the blame for the divorce between the Apollonian and Dionysian, giving primacy to the former (rationality and morality) over the latter (instincts), identifying happiness with wisdom and the wise man with a virtuous man, and suspecting the vital, passionate, and instinctive. Nietzsche chooses life as an absolute value: the essence of the world and man is not reason but impulse, life, and will to power.
B) The method for the study of moral and ethical values in Socrates is a rational method. Nietzsche uses the genealogical method, which tries to discover the origin of the notions of good and bad through the double track of etymology and history.
C) For Nietzsche, conscience is an invention of the priestly caste, a perversion in which the instinct of cruelty is directed against oneself.
D) In summary, for Socrates, what is essential to man’s will is truth; for Nietzsche, it is power.
Superman vs. Platonic Anthropology
Similarities: In both, their conception of man is derived from their conception of reality and knowledge: In Plato, the assertion of two worlds, that of Ideas and the sensible. In Nietzsche, his conception of life as will to power.
Differences:
1) Plato defends an anthropological dualism in which the immortal soul is the most important element of man and whose destination is the world of Ideas, and the body, on the contrary, is the prison of the soul. For Plato, the ideal is the just subordination of the instinctive and passionate soul to the wise rational soul. Well-being and happiness are reached when the idea of Good is reached. Nietzsche’s anthropology of the superman is dualistic. The superman represents the antithesis, the rejection of decadent Western culture. This man is irrational and despises reason. He proposes the superman, a vitalist man, who is freed from religion, morals, and metaphysics.
2) For Plato, the fate of the soul is the ideal world, the liberation of the body, which is the sensible world, is a prison. This is only shadow and appearance, as the world of Ideas is the real world, crowned by the idea of Good. For Nietzsche, life is absolute; he rejects the metaphysics of Plato as a deception because the only world that exists is the sensible world of pure exchange, as Heraclitus said, with whom Nietzsche agrees. The superman, on the contrary, does not listen to talk about the beyond and sticks to the ground.
3) For Plato, the logos is the nature of man; for Nietzsche, man is life and will to power. If Plato was a rationalist and relies on the power of reason to achieve absolute truth, Nietzsche is irrational, and reason is incapable of grasping life, and knowledge is a fraud and an illusion.