Kierkegaard remained heavily influenced by Hegel's vision of the death of Socrates as a tragedy. But he wanted to concentrate on the dying Socrates as tragic hero, not on the Athenian jury. He noted in Fear and Trembling that Socrates was 'an intellectual tragic hero': such a hero 'always dies before he dies'. Socrates is an emblem of conscious death, a hero who is fully, albeit paradoxically, aware of his own encounter with the unknown.
The German classicist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was also obsessed with the idea that Socrates' death was fully conscious and fully rationaclass="underline" an intellectual encounter with an irrational force. Nietzsche had a love-hate relationship with Socrates, whom he some- times idolised, sometimes villainised. His changing attitudes towards Socrates were prompted by his mixed feelings about the value of reason itself.
Whereas Hegel saw the death of Socrates as a tragic event, for Nietzsche Socratic philosophy was the death knell for tragedy and the beginning of cultural decadence. He declared in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) that the philosophy of Socrates signalled 'the death of tragedy': 'Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims "Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy." In these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy.' Socrates was too much of a rationalist to allow for tragedy. His death, in particular, suggested that reason could conquer all the dark side of life: 'The dying Socrates as man raised above the fear of death by reason is the escutcheon which above the entrance gate of science reminds everyone of its mission: to make existence appear as intelligible and hence as justified.' This was, for Nietzsche, the great lie.
Nietzsche's essential philosophical disagreement with Socrates centred on the ideas that reason is the strongest motivation in human life, and that life is ultimately com- prehensible. Nietzsche insists that people are not purely, or even primarily, rationaclass="underline" even Socrates was much less rational than he and his followers would have liked to think. Nietzsche mocks the last words as absurd: what kind of philosopher dies babbling about a rooster? The famous daimonion of Socrates was, according to Nietzsche, probably just an ear infection.
But Nietzsche's views of Socrates were constantly chang- ing. He acknowledges that 'Socrates, to confess it frankly, is so close to me that I almost always fight against him'. He admired and wanted to emulate the Socrates who was ironic, funny and unpredictable. If it came to a contest between Jesus and Socrates, Nietzsche thinks Socrates would win hands down. He remarks in Human, All Too Human (1878), 'Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in his cheery ear- nestness and prankish wisdom. Besides, he was smarter.'
By the time he was writing The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche again turned savagely against Socrates, treating him as the precursor to a decadent and corrupt civilisa- tion. Nietzsche even suggests that Socrates was perhaps not really Greek at all; his famous snub nose sounds suspicious from the point of view of genetic purity. In Twilight of the Idols (1888) he tells us, 'Socrates belonged by extraction to the lowest of the people: Socrates was rabble. We know, we can even still see, how ugly he was ... Was Socrates actu- ally really a Greek?' The ancient problem of Socrates' physi- ognomy becomes more hazardous and sinister in a period of eugenic experimentation and racial segregation. If not Greek, what was Socrates? African? Semitic? Nietzsche does not say, but his hints are dark.
Perhaps, Nietzsche seems to imply, the Athenians should not have limited themselves to exterminating just one Socrates. Nietzsche suggests not only that clever-clever non- Aryan intellectuals ought to be killed, but also that their own ultimate desire is for death: 'Socrates wanted to die - it was not Athens but he himself who administered the cup of poison; he forced Athens into it.' He tricked the Athenians into bringing shame on themselves by awarding him as a punishment the death that he had wanted all along.
The German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin (1892- 1940) is a good candidate for the role of twentieth-century Socrates. A serious moral thinker whose written work is fragmentary, he killed himself while trying to escape from Occupied France. In his doctoral thesis and only finished work, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin revisits and revises Nietzsche's distinction between the tragic hero and the dying Socrates.
Benjamin argues that the most important characteris- tic of the tragic hero is his silence. However much he may speak on stage, 'tragic man' is essentially silent and inarticu- late about his relationship to the gods and his own death. Tragedy is viewed as a struggle or agon between a single, isolated figure and the ancient gods. It is a struggle that the hero is bound to lose, dying as a sacrificial victim for the onward progress of his community: tragic death is a form of atonement. The hero has to die. He shrinks before death 'as a power familiar, personal and inherent in him'. The hero's sublime silence marks both his limited awareness of his own situation and his defiance. There is a vast gulf between the ideals of the hero and those that hold sway in his society and his world. The tragic hero's thoughts are, necessarily, unspeakable in his language. Benjamin observes, echoing an earlier German critic, that 'in tragedy pagan man realizes that he is better than his gods, but this realization strikes him dumb'.
Socrates, by contrast, dies talking. For this reason, the death of Socrates is not tragic; it is 'a parody of tragedy'. Socrates, unlike the tragic hero, understands his situation perfectly. He is fully conscious of his relationship towards death, and the gods, and his own society: 'In one stroke, the death of the hero has been transformed into that of a martyr.' The Phaedo reveals how far Socrates stands from the tragic hero. Socrates dies talking about immortality. Death itself is for him entirely alien, or unreaclass="underline" beyond it, 'he expects to return to himself'. The possibility of total annihilation and loss of consciousness, which is always present for the tragic hero, is impossible for the Phaedo Socrates. Instead of sacrifi- cial death, Socrates dies to set 'the example of the pedagogue'. The moral of his death is all on the surface, articulated by the dying man himself. It seems, in Benjamin's account, as if Plato's dialogues are bad art compared to Greek tragedy. Plato's Socrates seems to make the fatal, philistine moral error of telling us what to think.
totalitarianism
One of the most important issues in modern responses to the death of Socrates has been whether Socrates can be dis- tinguished from his pupil and creator, Plato. George Grote's monumental history of Greece (finished in 1856) made a sharp and influential distinction between Socrates - the open-minded teacher of the Apology - and Plato. This dis- tinction allowed many thinkers of the twentieth century to condemn Plato's politics as proto-fascist or worse, while admiring or worshipping Socrates for his free-spirited individualism.
The Swedish playwright August Strindberg's play about the death of Socrates, Hellas or Socrates (1903), implies a par- allel between Athens and contemporary Europe. Both are decadent imperialist societies, overrun with awful women and immoral playwrights, which will be destroyed by war and corruption, and in the process the best minds of their generation will also be destroyed.