Keeping Track of “Socrates”

Abstract

As these traits are part of a composite Socrates handed down by the pythagorizing or platonist tradition of Plato-interpretation, and as Nietzsche accepts some of them as constitutive of his Socrates, we need to complete our survey of the conventional composite before discussing Nietzsche’s Socrates any further. The traditional composite is, of course, not the historical Socrates, since the latter seems to have become a kind of public or literary property in his own lifetime. And the most valiant and scholarly efforts to recover the historical Socrates¹ succeed only in clarifying further just how literary or mythical a product everything is that we think we know about Socrates. But this fact itself is a measure of how great the impact was of his personality (and what he represented) on Classical culture. It was, precisely, what he represented that came at once into dispute. This would seem to mean that he was the charismatic embodiment of an archetype that was controversial. It would also seem to mean, for the controversy to be so heated and so enduring, that not transient but fundamental human, and politicizable, values were being projected or challenged by the original Socrates.