Nietzsche - Homer's Contest

https://archive.org/details/NietzscheHomersContest/mode/2up

Some of you may have already seen this piece; I think it’s worth revisiting following the book club. In it Nietzsche offers more details on the relation between tyrant/warrior and philosopher/artist in the ancient Greek polis. It’s another of his early works which (imho) means a) it can be read straightforwardly (Nietzsche didn’t develop his confusing aphoristic style until much later, so here he probably meant exactly what he said) and b) it should be read in light of his later work which represents a refinement, occasionally a correction, to many of the same ideas. In particular, I think this piece is invaluable for understanding The Greek State when both are read in light of Nietzsche’s later concept of sublimation.

A quick word on sublimation. Nietzsche was probably the first to use the word in the modern sense, anticipating Freud. To quote Kaufmann, who placed this idea at the center of his interpretation of Nietzsche and thus set the tone for much later scholarship:
“Nietzsche believed that a sexual impulse, for example, could be channeled into a creative spiritual activity, instead of being fulfilled directly. Similarly, the barbarian's desire to torture his foe can be sublimated into the desire to defeat one's rival, say, in the Olympic contests; it can even be sublimated into the rivalry of the tragedians who vie with each other for the highest prize, or into the efforts of a Plato to write more beautifully than the poets-and the entire Socratic dialectic could be construed as a sublimation of the same ancient striving to overwhelm one's foe.” (Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 220)

Kaufmann’s work is somewhat dated, and perhaps superseded, but imho still worth reading. He was certainly a philosophical adventurer in Nietzsche’s own spirit, and if nothing else it unearths whatever biases he may have had in translating Nietzsche.

Back to Homer’s Contest: Nietzsche argues that the competitive agon of ancient Greece expressed the same drives we see in Homer as this competitive, envious spirit is the wellspring of all Greek culture. The difference is that these drives are now expressed in culture rather than war: the Greek competitive genius has not been denied, as Nietzsche felt it was in modern Europe, but refined to a higher expression [sublimation versus abnegation: “Dionysus versus the crucified!” (Ecce Homo, XIV 9)]. And what a result: this was the source of Greek culture, for Nietzsche the most exquisite flowering of humanity in the ancient world.

Read in this light, Homer’s Contest raises provocative questions about Alamariu’s thesis on the relation between philosopher and tyrant. As far as I understand his argument, it is that philosopher and tyrant are essentially analogous types: “The case here to be made is that the preconditions for tyranny are identical or nearly identical, and that therefore a regime or culture that cultivates philosophy necessarily risks the cultivation of tyranny…” (232) His focus is on identifying the conditions necessary for both philosophy and tyranny – certainly a valid frame for inquiry – but reading Nietzsche from this angle obscures a key aspect of his thought: for Nietzsche, the philosopher is not merely an alternative type to the tyrant who grows from the same milieu, but is the tyrant’s sublimated type. The philosopher must arise after the tyrant as a refinement of the drives that led the former to express his cruelty and disregard for convention externally; in the philosopher or artist this cruelty is bent back in on the self and expressed internally as the artist submits himself to a form of tyranny that gives “style” to their character. Gay Science s. 290 is relevant here for the concept of ‘giving style,’ fundamental to Nietzsche’s thought, also BGE s. 188 for a discussion of self-directed tyranny as a precondition for artistry. This is an argument but also a paradigm for Nietzsche’s later work: in the Genealogy, as well as in Beyond Good and Evil. In BGE, for example, he explicitly presents his work as a reframing of moral inquiry to ask less about right and wrong, and more about where our concepts of right and wrong even came from (S. 16).

In sum: Nietszche wants to know where the philosopher comes from. The sort of social stress and disintegration sketched in The Greek State, and highlighted by Alamariu, may be a precondition to the formation of the tyrant: but throughout the bulk of Nietzsche’s work the preoccupation is with the formation of the philosopher from the tyrant. His admiration for the Greeks has more to do with Sophocles than Leonidas, but he recognizes the latter as a precondition for the former. That is, as I understand, the crux of his fascination with genealogy: beauty is born as cruelty sublimated. Beauty is for Nietzsche higher value than tyranny as a refined expression of the will to power – but it could not come into existence if humankind had no experience of tyranny.

I am essentially offering an alternate/supplementary interpretation to Alamariu’s – again, I think his plain reading of the Greek State is insightful and largely correct, but incomplete in that it doesn’t truly integrate that with the bulk of Nietzsche’s work and his key ideas. This interpretation should only be accepted as far as it illuminates Nietzsche’s work, which I think it does in several notable cases. The concept of amor fati – loving fate as the Greeks did by affirming all of history, “want[ing] nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity” (Ecce Homo, II 10) – snaps into focus from this angle, as even ugliness must be accepted as the soil out of which beauty would grow. As does the closely related idea of the eternal recurrence, which asks one to affirm all of existence together. Finally, this offers a cohesive interpretation of the ubermensch as a sublimated type, standing in relation to the philosopher as the philosopher to the tyrant. His fascination with the Greeks can be misleading: Nietzsche wants us to go forward, not back. His work is a prelude to a philosophy of the future.

I should also mention that this is pretty close to some standard academic interpretations of Nietzsche, following Kaufmann’s influence on modern Nietzsche scholarship in English-speaking academia. So I don’t claim any originality here.

>>1149
> for Nietzsche, the philosopher is not merely an alternative type to the tyrant who grows from the same milieu, but is the tyrant’s sublimated type. The philosopher must arise after the tyrant as a refinement of the drives that led the former to express his cruelty and disregard for convention externally;

I agree on the importance of sublimation, but this mapping of it onto the relation of tyranny and philosophy does not correspond to Alamariu's thought. (Whether it accurately represents Nietzsche's thought, I will leave aside for the present).

For Alamariu, tyranny and philosophy arose together simultaneously, with an intrinsic relation from the same sources. Both are late phenomena in the history of Greece, both springing from a radicalization of aristocracy in response to the decadence of traditional Greek culture, which had been monarchical (not tyrannical). It's not that first there was tyranny, then later philosophy.

Here's one quote from early in the thesis among many later:
The connection between philosophy and tyranny at bottom has to do with the necessities of educating the first philosophers. Such an education, in an era in which philosophy does not exist established as a tradition, that is, when philosophy is in its beginnings, necessarily risks the production instead of a tyrant—it depends on encouraging a political orientation that is tyrannical from the point of view of the polis; and it trains certain skills and abilities that are "tyrannical." [SBBP, 54]

> this mapping of it onto the relation of tyranny and philosophy does not correspond to Alamariu's thought.

I agree wholeheartedly. What's presented here is a markedly different view. I think it's worth considering as a complement or even counterpoint to Alamariu's arguments since he enlists Nietzsche's observations about Greek culture in presenting his own thought.

>>1152

Very fair.

One could also consider a synthesis in which:

- Alamariu's account of synchrony between philosophy and tyranny applies to philosophy before Plato;
- Nietzsche's account of philosophy as sublimation of tyranny applies to philosophy after Plato,

with Plato himself as the the transitional figure.

>>1156
Yeah there's a phase shift with Plato to philosophy as a self-conscious program and type, with a politics. Alamariu points out tyranny and proto-philosophy existed for a while pre-plato, but true philosophy only really comes into being with xenophon and then socrates/plato I think. So there's maybe a gap in Alamariu's thought that the anon here is pointing out in that philosophy in its full development does come historically after tyranny and so can't be quite the same. But it's a small gap; fully developed philosophy in Alamariu's reading is just philosophy that has been forced to become defensively political because of its close association with tyranny.