Corpus · The Birth of Tragedy · Full-text route

Socrates' Eye

Optional full-text route · Station 11 of 19

Read: §13 and §14 of The Birth of Tragedy, both in full.
Allow: About 50–75 minutes, including the passages, this guide, and a short written response.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Haussmann): §13 · §14.

About the overlap with Reading 6. Reading 6 (station 12) also assigns the ending of §14. That is the stretch where Nietzsche asks whether Socratism and art must stand only in opposition, and recounts the dream that told Socrates to practise music. Read all of §14 now so that you meet the section whole and in order. This page discusses the argument that leads up to that turn. Reading 6 gives the turn its close reading, and you will reread it there.

Quotations on this page follow Haussmann’s free translation. Haussmann prints lines from Goethe’s Faust in §13 and from Gellert in §14 in German, with translations in footnotes.

Before you read

Reading 5 named the second spectator whom §11 had held back: Socrates. It followed the canon by which Euripides measured the drama, “to be beautiful everything must be intelligible.” Nietzsche calls this aesthetic Socratism and sets it beside the Socratic proposition that only the knowing one is virtuous. §13 now asks what kind of person Socrates was, and why Nietzsche finds him so hard to judge. §14 imagines Socrates looking at tragedy, and follows what that way of looking did to poetry, to the tragic hero, and to the chorus.

Nietzsche’s attitude here is not simple contempt. He calls Socrates a monstrosity. He also says Socrates showed a power found “only among the very greatest instinctive forces.” Watch for both judgments.

The main question: Who, on Nietzsche’s account, looks at tragedy and sees only causes without effects, and why does he think that gaze reorganizes both art and philosophy?

Read both sections once. Mark each place where Nietzsche draws on a source for his portrait of Socrates: Aristophanes, an anecdote, the Delphic oracle, Plato. Keep reading to the end of §14; the last turn belongs to Reading 6.

What to notice

1. “Only by instinct.” What does Socrates discover about the poets, statesmen, and artists of Athens, and what does he conclude from it?
2. The voice that only warns. How does Socrates’ inner voice differ from the way instinct works, on Nietzsche’s account, in productive people?
3. The boat. What happens to poetry when Plato, the pupil of Socrates, gives it a new form?

Close reading

Two names in one breath

§13 begins with the pairing of Socrates and Euripides by their contemporaries. There was a tale that Socrates helped Euripides “in poetising,” and the adherents of the “good old time” named both among the agitators of the day. In Aristophanes’ comedy, Socrates appears as “the first and head sophist.” Nietzsche adds that Socrates attended the theatre only when a new play by Euripides was performed. He adds that the Delphic oracle called Socrates “the wisest of men,” with Euripides second and Sophocles third: three “knowing ones.” §13, Socrates and Euripides

Notice the evidence. It is anecdote, comedy, and an oracle tradition, which Nietzsche uses to show that “contemporaneous antiquity” saw the connection. That establishes how some Athenians talked about the two men. It does not by itself establish a shared philosophy.

“Only by instinct”

The decisive word, Nietzsche says, came from Socrates himself. Visiting statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he found everywhere “the conceit of knowledge.” They practised their callings “only by instinct.” Of that phrase Nietzsche writes: “with this phrase we touch upon the heart and core of the Socratic tendency.” Existing art and existing ethics are condemned for their lack of insight. From that lack Socrates infers that the world as it stands needs correcting, and he takes himself to be called to correct it. §13, “only by instinct”

Nietzsche then pauses on his own uncertainty. Socrates is “this most questionable phenomenon of antiquity,” and Nietzsche asks who could dare to disown the Greek world of Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, and Phidias. §13, the questionable phenomenon

The voice that only dissuades

Nietzsche’s key to Socrates is the “daimonion,” the divine voice that spoke to him and “always dissuades.” In productive people, Nietzsche says, instinct creates and affirms while consciousness criticizes. In Socrates it is reversed: “it is instinct which becomes critic; it is consciousness which becomes creator—a perfect monstrosity per defectum!” Socrates is “the specific non-mystic,” a man in whom logic has grown to excess. Yet Nietzsche adds at once that this logical drive has a native power such as we meet “only among the very greatest instinctive forces.” §13, the daimonion

Keep both judgments. The word “monstrosity” is contempt. The comparison to the greatest instinctive forces is something like admiration. The portrait needs both, because Nietzsche is trying to explain how one person could turn a culture.

A death that became an ideal

Nietzsche ends §13 with Socrates’ trial and death. He claims that only exile was demanded, and that the death sentence “seems to have been brought about by Socrates himself.” That is Nietzsche’s interpretation of the trial. This guide does not certify it as history. Socrates goes to his death calmly, like the last reveller leaving Plato’s symposium at dawn. “The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the noble Greek youths,” and Plato above all “prostrated himself before this scene.” §13, the death of Socrates

Reading 6, which follows this lesson, returns to the same image in §15, where the dying Socrates stands over the gate of science. Here it is the founding image of a new kind of youth.

The Cyclopean eye

§14 asks us to imagine “the one great Cyclopean eye of Socrates fixed on tragedy.” Artistic enthusiasm had never glowed in that eye. It sees in tragedy something absurd, “causes that seemed to be without effects, and effects apparently without causes.” The only poetry Socrates understood, Nietzsche says, was “the Æsopian fable.” Tragedy did not even “tell the truth,” and it addressed those who have “but little wit,” so it was to be avoided. Plato, a young tragic poet, “burned his poems” to become Socrates’ pupil. §14, the Cyclopean eye

Connect this to Reading 5. There, Euripides judged the drama by the demand that the beautiful be intelligible, a principle Nietzsche ties to Socrates. Here Socrates himself looks at an art he cannot understand, and judges it by what he can.

Poetry in the boat of dialectic

Yet art does not simply disappear. Plato, Nietzsche says, was driven “by sheer artistic necessity” to create a new form. His dialogue mixes narrative, lyric, and drama, prose and poetry. It “was as it were the boat in which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself together with all her children,” steered by Socrates. Plato thus gave posterity “the prototype of the novel,” in which poetry holds “the rank of ancilla,” a handmaid to dialectic. “The Apollonian tendency has chrysalised in the logical schematism.” §14, Plato’s dialogue

This is a striking claim. Philosophy does not abolish art; it subordinates art. Ask whether Nietzsche’s image of a rescue boat is praise or regret. It is probably both.

Three maxims and the death of tragedy

Nietzsche now names the optimism in dialectic, which “celebrates a jubilee in every conclusion.” Once it enters tragedy, it drives tragedy toward “the death-leap into the bourgeois drama.” He states the three Socratic maxims, “Virtue is knowledge; man only sins from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy,” and concludes that “these three fundamental forms of optimism involve the death of tragedy.” The hero must now argue for his actions, virtue and knowledge must visibly connect, and the justice of Aeschylus sinks into “poetic justice” and its deus ex machina. §14, the three maxims

Test the claim. Why would a tragedy in which virtue guarantees happiness cease to be tragic? What must a tragedy be able to show that these maxims forbid?

The chorus becomes an accident

In the new, optimistic stage-world, the chorus appears as “something accidental,” a leftover from tragedy’s origin. Nietzsche’s account made the chorus the cause of tragedy. He now makes an admission that complicates his own story: this perplexity about the chorus “first manifests itself in Sophocles.” Sophocles narrowed the chorus’s role until it stood almost beside the actors. Euripides, Agathon, and New Comedy follow. Dialectic, he concludes, drives music out of tragedy “with the scourge of its syllogisms.” §14, the chorus

If the decline begins with Sophocles, then Euripides, and Socrates behind him, did not start it. Nietzsche says as much: he goes on to suppose an anti-Dionysian tendency at work even before Socrates.

The closing turn: handed to Reading 6

The end of §14 turns the argument around. Nietzsche will not treat Socrates as a purely destructive power. He asks whether Socratism and art must be only opposed, and recounts the dream that told Socrates to practise music. §14, the closing turn

You will reread this ending in Reading 6, which gives it its close reading (Reading 6, commentary 1 and commentary 2). For now, notice only how sharply it changes direction after the case against Socrates you have just followed.

A difficulty

Is Nietzsche describing the historical Socrates, or constructing a type?

The portrait draws on comedy, anecdote, an oracle tradition, and Plato’s dialogues. From them Nietzsche builds a figure in whom instinct and consciousness have changed places, and makes that figure responsible for the death of tragedy. As a type, the theoretical person can be tested against what it helps you see: in Euripides’ plays, in Plato’s dialogues, and in later confidence that knowledge can correct life. As history, the portrait makes claims that need evidence of a different kind, including the claim that Socrates brought about his own death sentence.

Write two sentences, one about each. Then consider the complication in §14. If Sophocles already weakened the chorus, is Socrates the cause of tragedy’s death, or its most powerful expression?

Retrospect checkpoint: an 1886 comparison

If you are following the chronological alternate, skip this until after the 1886 preface lesson.

In self-criticism §1, Nietzsche asks whether the Socratism of morality might be a sign of decline, weariness, and disease. He ends: “O Socrates, Socrates, was this perhaps thy secret?” §4 suggests that the Greeks grew more logical and “scientific” as they weakened. The 1872 text already speaks of decline. In §13, the adherents of the “good old time” blame Socrates and Euripides for the “progressive degeneration of the physical and mental powers.” In §14, Nietzsche calls Sophocles’ treatment of the chorus “an important sign that the Dionysian basis of tragedy already begins to disintegrate.” What the 1886 preface adds is the explicit diagnostic question: whether Socratism is itself a symptom of decline, weariness, and disease, asked in the vocabulary of health and physiology. Record whether the later question describes the earlier portrait, sharpens it, or redescribes it.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 150–200 words answering:

What does art lose, on Nietzsche’s account, when it is judged by the standard of knowledge, and what does it keep?

• Use one detail from §13 (for example “only by instinct” or the daimonion) and one from §14 (for example the boat of dialectic or the three maxims).
• Say what, on Nietzsche’s account, survives in subordinate form in Plato’s dialogue.
• End with one question you want Reading 6 to answer when it returns to the end of §14.

A successful response keeps Nietzsche’s admiration and contempt both in view. It separates the type of the theoretical person from claims about the historical Socrates, and it uses the admission about Sophocles to test the story of tragedy’s death.

Continue

Continue the optional full-text route: Station 12 · Reading 6: Can Reason Explain Everything? →

Reading 6 belongs to the eight-session introduction. Its assignment begins with the ending of §14, which you will now reread, and continues through §15. At the end of Reading 6, use its “Continue the optional full-text route” link.

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A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 24, 2026.

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