Ian Grant

12/4/2014
Limitations of a Socratic Perspective
EBLIS O'SHAUGHNESSY: So... who died?
LUCIEN: Nobody died. How can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an
action?
EBLIS O'SHAUGHNESSY: Then what died? Who are you mourning?
ABEL: A point of view.

Neil Gaiman, Sandman, The Wake

The tragic is, in some sense, also the incomprehensible, or at least the cognitively
dissonant. Tragedy doesnt make sense (10). It can make a lot more sense in hindsight, but a
tragedy always has some absurdity at its heart, something entirely in opposition to reason. It was
this quality of the tragic that Socrates could not abide. The cognitive dissonance implicit in
tragedy is at odds with a Socratic aesthetic which demands of the beautiful that it exists in
accordance with the rational (12). The suicide of tragedy came about because this Socratic
aesthetic, this Apollonian aesthetic, could not coexist with tragedy and its inclusion of a
Dionysian, irrational perspective. The intoxication of the Dionysian fugue state gave way to the
self-consciousness of Euripidean comedy, which invited the spectator onto the stage as a critical
and interpretive authority in their own right.
Tragedy synthesizes two approaches to art, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The
Apollonian is fundamentally bound up with the principium individuationis, with the delimiting
of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense (4). The Apollonian artist is
the dreamer, the epic poet: the one who wishes to construct a beautiful and intricate illusion (3).
The Dionysian approach, on the other hand, wants to break down such boundaries, wants truth
and nature in their most forceful form, unmediated by illusions or symbols or even the
principium individuationis itself. ...This is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy,

that the state and society and, quite generally, the gulfs between man and man give way to an
overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature (7).
Tragedy, then, is a fusion of the dream state of the Apollonian and the intoxicated state of
the Dionysian. It originated with the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of primitive tragedy (7),
which was a predominantly Dionysian expression (with the withering away of the principium
individuationis implemented in this case with the choral melding of many voices into one).
However, it was a Dionysian expression wrapped in an Apollonian idiom: it built up the
scaffolding of a fictitious natural state and on it placed fictitious natural beings The satyr, as
the Dionysian chorist, lives in a religiously acknowledged reality under the sanction of myth and
cult. In this context, the satyr is the voice of the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy. The satyr has a
dramatic faculty; has the ability to inspire in others the urge to transform [themselves] and
speak out of other bodies and souls (8) And the satyr in turn sees the god as the
Apollinian complement of his own state, which completes the synthesis. Dionysus no longer
speaks through forces but as an epic hero, almost in the language of Homer.
Nietzsche characterizes the Socratic perspective in three maxims: Virtue is knowledge;
man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy (14). This is a Socratic optimism
completely at odds with the Dionysian wisdom and nausea of Silenus. The knowledge of Silenus
is not a liberating knowledge, an empowering knowledge, a virtuous knowledge; it is rather a
despairing, nauseating knowledge, a knowledge that overwhelms and subsumes the ego. The
realism of Dionysus is prerational, preimagistic The Dionysian musician is, without any
images, himself pure priomordial pain and its primordial re-echoing (5). Socratic optimism is
the notion that suffering has a cause, the cause can be known, and knowledge of the cause can

eliminate the suffering. Dionysian realism acknowledges simply that suffering is, universal and
omnipresent, beyond images or forms.
The art of a culture, taken as a whole, is an expression of the aesthetic of that culture, and
therefore on a deeper level its ethics and even its metaphysics. Apollonian art is an expression of
the beauty of forms and meaningful illusions, the truthful lies, what Buddhists call upaya or
skillful means. It reflects the worldview of the shaper, the sculptor, the plastic artist. Dionysian
art is an expression of the omnipotent Will behind the principium individuationis, as it were,
life going on eternally beyond all appearance and despite all destruction (16). The Dionysian
and the Apollonian are at odds in part because the Dionysian wants to dissolve the same borders
and boundaries that lend definition to the Apollonian understanding. Tragic art synthesizes the
two by permitting Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, who interprets to the chorus its Dionysiac
condition by means of this symbolic appearance. The Apollonian artifice expresses and
interprets the Dionysian natural experience.
Socrates was careful (or at any rate Plato was careful) in the Republic to treat the
question of what sort of art lent itself to the development of virtue, and his ethical classification
of the arts reflects a deeply anti-Dionysian bias. The dramatic arts, the imitative and mimetic
arts, are entirely excluded (Republic, Book X). Tragedy is explicitly excluded, and incidentally
Plato differs from Nietzsche in identifying Homer as the first of tragedy writers. The Socratic
could not abide the tragic: we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and
praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you
go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the
reason of mankind but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State. On one level, what

the Dionysian is about is pleasure and pain, and Socrates wanted people to be motivated by other
things.
The suicide of tragedy was fulfilled by Euripides, who brought the spectator on to the
stage (11). Euripides destroyed the sanctity of the stage: no longer did the dramatic mirror
reflect the divine in the onlooker but rather, simply and ultimately disappointingly, the onlooker
as he was. This was in keeping with a Socratic attitude of honesty and plain-spokenness, but it
robbed the tragic of its divine madness, only to replace it with bourgeois mediocrity. And so
Tragedy died in an appropriately tragic way, by providing the framework for her own
irrelevance, her own subversion by mediocrity and her own embrace of the common and the
bourgeois. This New Comedy was tragedys reanimated corpse. Its very existence mocked
what it grew out of, felt tragedy took itself too seriously, and ultimately wanted nothing more
than to be able to laugh at itself. Thus was the Dionysiac genius of tragedy lost.
Max Webers idea of the iron cage of rationality gives perhaps the most vivid example of
what the cost of a Socratic perspective might be. A being with such a perspective is isolated from
the Dionysian mysteries, from the madness and the formlessness that unite all things. It is
equally true that the Dionysian perspective excludes the Socratic one. A reconciliation might be
hoped for in the music-making Socrates, a new type of artist capable of expressing the net of
art which is spread over existence,but Nietzsche describes this only as a potentiality, a new type
that might come into being in the future (15). Without the existence of that type, a Socratic
perspective is cut off from Dionysian wisdom.
Nietzsche admits that his characterization of Socrates is an incomplete one, and treats the
question of the music-making Socrates. Socrates after all all recapitulates the wisdom of
Silenus in the Phaedo, when he compares different alternatives for an afterlife and concludes an

oblivion like a dreamless sleep would be quite an acceptable answer to the question of the
afterlife. Any interpretation of Socrates would have to take into account his unyielding humility
before the Gods, and in that Socratic humility (which often presents outwardly as hubris) there is
an acceptance of divine madness, of something that it is hard not to characterize as Dionysian.
The Socratic perspective is biased against the Dionysian but does not reject it entirely--Socrates
speaks of divine madness in the Phaedrus. Instead it tries to contain it; it is this containment,
this caging of tragedy, that could be said to have motivated the suicide of tragedy, as it is utterly
against the nature of the Dionysian to be contained.
The painting of Euripides invitation of the spectator to the stage as the marker of the
death of the tragic seems to be at odds with a notion of the Dionysian that removes boundaries
between people. Elevation of the unwashed masses to a position of critical authority on
something as fundamental as aesthetics seems to go against Apollonian tendencies, not
Dionysian ones; and certainly it seems to violate Socratic norms. Socrates is disdainful of
majority opinion in virtually every dialogue Plato wrote: how could he ever sign off on the idea
that the everyman is a valid authority on aesthetics?
Nietzsche also says Socratism is bent on the destruction of myth (23). This too, seems
at odds with Socrates depiction in the dialogues, where he repeatedly uses myth as a didactic
tool. Ultimately, to call Socrates a myth-destroyer is to repeat in some sense the charge of
Meletus in the Apology. It seems like Nietzsche wants to put words in Socrates mouth to a
certain extent, as indeed Plato did when he wrote the Dialogues in the first place, to advance his
own argument. The biggest argument for Socrates being a myth-destroyer is probably the
Republic, where he prescribes essentially the systematic reduction of myth to fable in the
kallipolis. But Socrates didnt think the kallipolis would work to begin with, and he says so at

several points in the dialogue. In his own life and in his advice to others Socrates feared the gods,
and treated at least some myths as sacred.