Civilization and culture are two words thrown about so often in written and spoken language that it can be hard to find succinct definitions for them. We all know what they mean, but to what, where or when these concepts point is harder to define. One of the earlier theorists of social development, Giambattista Vico, attempts this in The New Science, a meditation "on a science of the nature of the nations from which their humanity arose, beginning everywhere in their religions and coming to completion in their sciences, disciplines and arts" (4). Using Vico as a starting point, it becomes clearer what we mean by culture, as that trajectory which begins in religion and comes to exist as a group of sciences, disciplines and arts.
The Ancient Greeks, customarily taken to represent the origins of Western civilization, are as good a culture to study as any, specifically with regard to the arts of what we today call poetry and philosophy. The scholar Aaron Gare has noted that the formation of social institutions engenders a certain reflective instinct, which in the case of Ancient Greek civilization, by contrast to other civilizations, allowed for the specific choosing of institutions meant to uphold noble values (3). What were these noble virtues passed down in Greek education? Or perhaps a better question is, what defines nobility as opposed to baseness?
Friedrich Nietzsche answers this question one way in Beyond Good and Evil, where he writes that nobility has some fundamental certainty about itself, "something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself" (227). Thus, nobility can appropriate whatever it deems good or noble. Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, further defines Nietzsche's nobility as based on aristocracy, action, and affirmation, and opposed to negation of life and reactive ways of being, which may manifest as cowardice, pain, weakness, accusation and resentment (119-20). Nobility by necessity distinguishes and differentiates. Deleuze writes, "What Nietzsche often calls distinction is the eternal character of what is affirmed..." (120). For Deleuze, Nietzsche's differentiation is closely aligned with taste, choosing, and interpretation. This does not preclude what is affirmed from changing, however.
In Ancient Greece, paideia was a form of education based on cultivating this taste or affirmation; it was a way to ready noble young men for war through physical training and the distinguishing of virtue from vice. Gare points out how the art of Ancient Greek society—especially the tragedies of Aeschylus and other early dramatists—exemplified the perils of fewer limits: paideia was a way of upholding those limits and values agreed upon by previous generations (4). Paideia, then, has a dualistic nature as both a set of limitations and impositions on noble nature, as well as a perpetuation of agreed-upon noble values. The noble, active nature is constrained by culture, which, for Nietzsche, is simply "training and selection" (Deleuze 133). While law-making, for example, is active, the following of laws is reactive. Culture, or humanity acting on humanity, is the acting out of reactive forces.
As such, culture is represented by any collectivity; the church, state, races, classes: herds. Culture primarily produces reactive states, not active individuals, and history, writes Deleuze, is a culture's record of how it maintains, preserves and organizes the reactive life (138-9). Yet this does not explain how cultures change. For this, Deleuze considers an idealistic, post-historic realm where the product of culture is the sovereign individual, the one who acts out reactive forces in his own way: "The finished product of species activity is not the responsible man himself or the moral man, but the autonomous and supramoral man, that is to say the one who actually acts his reactive forces and in whom all reactive forces are acted" (137). The active individual opposes the herd, which in its striving to perpetuate its values creates an obeying reactive man. In this striving, "Species activity in history is inseparable from a movement which perverts it and its product...it is identical to a 'degeneration of culture'" (138). Continuous reactivity degrades those original values that the nobles perpetuated through paideia. Within history, selective forces that perpetuate the species favor reactive man; the active man is more likely to be singled out and not survive or carry on their supramoral values. From the active man's perspective culture is degeneration of the human species. From the perspective of culture, however, the active man is degenerate for resisting culture, for being too noble.
Nietzsche's Problem with Socrates
Deleuze writes obliquely about Nietzsche's active men: Socrates, Christ, and Luther, how each bring about the downfall of the golden age culture that came before them: Athens, Rome, the Renaissance: "The genealogist is well aware that there is a health that only exists as the presupposition of the becoming-sick" (167). The active man represents both this health and this becoming-sick: the former as an individual, the latter as an embodiment of cultural decline. Recognizing that these active men are themselves the first symptoms of cultural decline, we could consider them inflection points of human civilization, when the ascendant plot-line of culture peaks and changes direction. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche goes even farther—for him, Socrates is the single most critical point in history.1 And while much has been written about Nietzsche's complicated relationship with Socrates, Drew Hyland argues that while Nietzsche's views on Socrates in his later work do not remain identical with his early work, they are consistent regarding how he changed Greek civilization (12).2 Michael Gillespie qualifies this shift by describing how Nietzsche's goal in Twilight of the Idols is to "...return to the eternal idols...and subordinate them within his musical form, which is itself the form of life. In The Birth of Tragedy, he argued that life was only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon; here he suggests that all art and aesthetics is justifiable only as an expression of ascending life" (110). "The Problem of Socrates," then, begins with how Socrates, like all "the wisest sages" (Twilight 12), seems to be an expression of descending life.
Socrates' last words about owing Asclepius a cock, a common form of sacrifice for a cure, indicate that he views life as an illness only death can cure. If Socrates was a life-denier, how could he be wise? Nietzsche questions whether Socrates was in fact wise, whether all sages who have a negative judgment of life are wise, and if wisdom implies decadence (Twilight 12). As Werner Dannhauser acknowledges, it is possible to speak a truth despite being a decadent (208-9). But is Socrates' statement about Asclepius suggestive of truth? In the second aphorism, Nietzsche inveighs against value-judgments about life: "Judgments, value judgments about life, for or against, can in the final analysis never be true; they have value only as symptoms...such judgments are stupidities" (Twilight 13). But is it not the case that Nietzsche, in calling judgments about life stupidities, is making a judgment himself? When Nietzsche asks if all the great sages are decadents or declining types, as with many of his questions in "The Problem of Socrates," he is leading himself as well as the reader to a tenuous judgment, one that does not have to be final, as we shall see by the end of this chapter, where Nietzsche revises and further complicates his notion of Socrates' decadence. As Gillespie notes, "Twilight, according to Nietzsche, is neither a Yes nor a No to everything it considers; in fact it says nothing at all; it does not judge" (110). Yet Twilight's playful aestheticism does do much suggesting, even if it undermines or refines these suggestions eventually. By ending this section with questions about whether all the great sages were decadents, or were even wise to begin with, Nietzsche concludes by mentioning for the first and only time, "the problem of Socrates." Dannhauser writes, "The implication is that he means to show the decadence of Socrates but not his lack of wisdom... He is wise because he quite possibly understood that the value of life cannot be estimated, and that his valuations were a function of his own decadence. The self-awareness of decadence is a kind of wisdom" (210). Thus it is possible for Socrates to be both wise and decadent.
In the next aphorism, Nietzsche writes, "Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the lowest folk" (Twilight 13), as demonstrated by his ugliness. Later in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes, "Ugly things are understood as signs and symptoms of degenerescence... A hatred springs up here: who is man hating here? But there is no doubt: the decline of his type" (53). If the Greeks hated Socrates, it was because he did not seem to them Greek enough. In a culture that associates beauty with the good, the noble, and the ideal—these are just some of the connotations of the word kalos—for Socrates to be considered wise indicates a revaluation of everything a good Athenian knew to be true; Socrates indicated a separation of appearance from essence. A physiognomist arrives in Athens and, "...said to his face that he was a monstrum—that he contained all bad vices and cravings within him. And Socrates simply answered, "You know me, sir!" (13). But Socrates is a master of himself, he can contain all those contradictory impulses, and channel all of his instincts into reason. In this sense, Nietzsche writes that the equation "reason=virtue=happiness" (13), denies those instincts based on taste and differentiation which noble Athenians relied upon. In the pre-Socratic world, authority was enough to give reason; it came from within, "But the philosophers are the decadents of Hellenism, the counter-movement against the ancient, noble taste (against the agonal instinct, against the polis, against the value of breeding, against the authority of convention)" (78). In such a culture, to have to give reasons for oneself is a show of weakness: "Whatever has to get itself proved in advance isn't worth much" (14). The Athenian noble, forced to justify himself to Socrates, to provide a definition to the question "What is...?" can be easily confounded through logic and contradiction. This type of thinking was vastly different from a reliance on the particulars of types, which, according to Nietzsche, was acceptable in noble Athenian society before an era of sophistry. Socrates indicates a new taste—a taste against decaying noble instincts, a capacity to contain his own base impulses through reason alone. Dialectic ignores the question "Which one?" for the question "What is?" In the latter there is always posed an opposite quality to that which is defined, which is essentially negative and reactive. For Nietzsche, the multiplicity and typological differentiation which he associates with the noble taste of the pre-Socratic age is directly opposed to the dialectical and oft-ironic mode of Socratic questioning, the move to reduce, define, and contradict. This dialectical method that led Socrates to seem wise to the Ancient Greeks is also, according to Nietzsche, what makes him unwise, or degenerate, for its overreliance on reason as opposed to instinct. For Nietzsche, "To have to fight against the instincts—this is the formula for decadence: so long as life is ascendant, happiness is instinct" (15). When life is degenerating, reason must be used to pit the instincts against each other, to sort them. But when life is ascendant, it is enough to follow instinct to be happy. As Walter Kauffman writes, defining Socratism as the outlook Socrates embodies (399), "Socratism itself is decadent and cannot produce a real cure; by thwarting death it can only make possible an eventual regeneration which may not come about for centuries. Socrates himself realized this: "In the wisdom of his courage to die, he recognized that for himself no ultimate cure was possible—except death (407)." Socrates is not a life-denier or nihilist as much as he recognizes the formula that "reason=virtue=happiness" is a delusion, and that at least for him, death is the only solution: "Socrates is no doctor...Socrates himself has just been sick for a long time..." (Twilight 17).
The Paradox of Socrates
In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes how ascetic values are one way of fighting against the instincts, how they can be a form of life-denial, depending on one's type.