Abstract

Nietzsche attacks Socrates and Plato in his early work because, resurrected among the moderns by Rousseau and Kant, he saw their views as morally catastrophic. And while I concede to him that we have reason to fault Plato's claim that every satisfaction of an appetite increases the preponderance of "the bodily" in our character, and that Plato causes serious confusion by likening moral judgement to calculation, I deny that these are Plato's only, or most valuable ideas. If we look with a sympathetic eye at what is best in Plato, we will see the spirit animating him is not dogmatic, but exploratory and tentative. Plato at his best, I find, is like Socrates, aware of possibilities of irony even at the root of those values in the light of which he lived and died. ;As I make it out, living as Socrates did in pursuit of the truth, is not much different to how we would live if we obeyed Nietzsche's urging us to "become who you are!". That this is so can be seen in that Nietzsche's early opposition to Socrates and Plato in his early work, is transformed in his late work, into a "following". ;What I find of most value in Nietzsche's moralising is his attempt to re-direct our attention from abstractions, whether "Ideas" or "History", to life. But as I see it, "aestheticism" and "naturalism", the two different aspects of his attempt to do so, pull in different directions: and so I look elsewhere for a philosopher to bring philosophy back to life. ;Such a one I find in Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work I characterise as "Socratic" not only because it is tentative, exploratory, returning again and again to issues at which he worries, as a dog a bone, but also because it springs from a "religious" impulse. In this latter respect, Wittgenstein's work can be contrasted with that of Nietzsche. ;I find Wittgenstein and Nietzsche agreeing that what we say means what it does independently of what we believe, or intend, but not independently of what we do. So it is that for both men, language and freedom meet at that point in our lives where we must struggle if we are to invest our words with a meaning which can express all that is in us to say, yet without compromising our integrity