IV.
In his Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes much about the philosopher. The philosopher reshapes the world in his eyes only when he discovers that the world has no shape, no intrinsic law or order.
A philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from without, as if from above and below, as by his kind of events and thunder-claps; who is himself perhaps a storm and pregnant with new lightnings; a fateful man around whom snarling, quarrelling, discord and uncanniness is always going on. A philosopher: alas, a creature which often runs away from itself, is often afraid of itself—but which is too inquisitive not to keep “coming to itself” again.[2]
Probably no description of a philosopher could be more contrary to what the Platonic philosopher is about.
Yet most of the words are the same. The knowledge of oneself for Plato does not initially arise from within oneself, even granted that we are to know ourselves. It arises from the divine impetus that seeks to find out why one is wise through finding out whether those who are said to be wise are or are not wise, whether they know what they think they know. Nietzsche’s philosopher does not reach anything outside of himself unless he first puts it there. He lost his faith in the world on seeing that Christians had lost their faith in God. He accepted the logical consequences as he thought modern man did not.
The new philosopher is a revolutionary against the concept of the world that claimed it was founded on reason, something that the philosopher did not himself establish, but discovered. Nietzsche identified Platonism and Christianity in the same futile effort to know the truth. This “prejudice” belonged both to the believer and to the philosopher. He called for “courage” in the philosopher, a courage to admit the consequence of the discovery that neither reason nor revelation were true. He was not afraid, as most modern men are, to admit the consequences of the view that no order existed in the cosmos or the human world. God is dead. Therefore, we are free. All things are permissible. The only things that can be there, that could be called a world, is what man puts there. This man has courage. He is exhilarated by the quest to replace the world with his will. This is a human claim for the grandeur of the gods. He is not just a man but a “superman.”
“The ‘results’ of the history of philosophy do not consist in a catalogue of formulas which can be totted up into a final sum. Instead they are a series of raids on the deep places of being carried out according to the possibilities of their time,” Joseph Ratzinger wrote in 1977. “The history in which these explorations were made remains a living history, not a pre-history. As philosophizing continues, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas do not become prehistory; they remain the originating figures of an enduring approach to the Ground of what is. In their way of thought and its access to the Origin, a certain aspect of reality, a dimension of being, is caught as in a mirror. None of them is philosophy or the philosopher.”[3] Philosophy is not something that is “done” for us. Philosophizing continues in us.
“Do not listen to those who tell us, being human, to deal only with human things,” Aristotle tells us in the tenth book of his Ethics. Who should we listen to? We who are philosophers do not deal with human things, but with what the Greeks first called “divine” things. This phrase did not mean things of “revelation,” as we now speak of it. It meant the things that were true, that did not change, that were based on what is. The life of the philosopher is a lonely life. But philosophy only exists in conversation. Philosophy needs and brings forth the acts of friendship in which we find those with whom we can converse about what matters, about the highest things. The life of the philosopher does not mean that the philosopher has no family, no responsibilities. Like Socrates, he may be a poor provider for his wife and children. He may have a better understanding of what is and is not really important. But he remains a human being seeking to be a good, full human being.
There are emperors like Marcus Aurelius and rich men who are philosophers, who seek the truth. Ordinary folks philosophize. No society is safe unless there be those within it who seek the truth and find it. There are “philosophies” that are dangerous to human living because they are not grounded in what is. They always present themselves as true and good. The most dangerous philosopher is the one who is also a politician whose “truth” is not the truth of what is but of what he wills. The life of the philosopher is a fragile life. The city can destroy him, as it did Socrates and Christ. But it is a life that is for its own sake, not the philosopher’s sake, but for the truth’s sake. The polity is to be ordered for the good of what it is to be man in this mortal life.
But every human being transcends the polis by, as Strauss said, “What is best in him.” And what is best in him is not political. This is why Socrates constantly affirmed that “It is never right to do wrong.” When the polity by its laws says it is right to do so, this is when we need the philosopher most. This is what his life is for in the city. But it is also for itself, for the sake of the things that are. This is why the philosophic life is also a delight and why human affairs, as Plato said, are not particularly important compared to the divine things.
Plato: “Pay no attention to the practitioners of philosophy, whether good or bad. Rather give serious attention to the thing (philosophy) itself.”
Rousseau: “I concluded the reading of my Confessions and everyone was silent.”
Benedict XVI: “The philosopher was someone who knew how to teach the essential art: the art of being authentically human—the art of living and dying.”
Notes:
- The Basic Works of Plato, edited by J. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), #173d.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), #292, 198.
- Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, [1977] 1988), 24.
To learn more, visit the ISI short course on Western Civilization.