What did we add to these assumptions in the 2,300 years between Socrates and Nietzsche? Specifically, there are knowable truths about human excellence or the good for us as human beings (moral truths). However, there is truth to be known and told in words.You should go through life with skepticism and doubt. You shouldn’t act on things that you can’t show are true. Customs and assumptions are unreliable and dangerous.This is a demanding ideal that requires renouncing other entanglements, such as money, political power, and romance. A good life, or perhaps the best life, is a life of pursuing truth.What assumptions does Socrates make when he sets out on his mission? Maybe … He is a critic of asceticism who actually lives a solitary life devoted to writing. He refuses to write connected arguments, instead employing an aphoristic style full of irony, paradox, and contradiction.

He is a critic of language who uses it masterfully. Nietzsche challenges this Socratic quest.

He is a critic of rhetoric (who, however, speaks eloquently) and an ascetic who has renounced any role in society other than truth-seeker. Instead of writing or producing connected arguments, he merely interrogates his fellow citizens, testing what they think. Socrates begins a quest for knowledge, claiming that he only knows that he knows nothing. Before discussing this text, my class had read Plato’s Apology I present Nietzsche and the Socrates of the Apology as foils. Here–free for the digital commons–are some teaching notes for chapter 1 of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil.

Nietzsche beyond good and evil 1 of 1