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Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

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Nietzsche's unfinished manuscript is an interesting, and frequently very moving, complement to his other works on the Greek philosophers. Nietzsche steps us through what he considers to be the most significant ideas of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras (among others) and he is most determined to pull the reader into the sense of intellectual adventure that drove these great thinkers. He goes to great pains to make sure that we do not simply dismiss (or worse, patronize) these early philosophers and that we consider the implications of their cosmologies seriously.

Unfortunately, this is not really a scholarly edition of this work, which deserves much more thorough editing than it gets, as well as a more detailed explanation of the various translation choices that were made. Marianne Cowan's introduction is very superficial, and she informs us that "it is not difficult for the lay reader to check for himself the carefully translated and annotated texts of the philosopher in question, though he will do well to compare several such sources". Oh well, it's an inexpensive edition, but there is still no excuse for some very unsubstantiated and nasty comments which Cowan makes regarding Nietzsche supposedly attempting to "glorify" Wagner and Schopenhauer and provide "propaganda" for them. Since Wagner doesn't even make an appearance in this book, it's quite inappropriate, and she provides no detail whatsoever for this judgment which reeks of received academic opinion rather than good scholarship. Any serious student of Nietzsche cannot overlook the significant role that Schopenhauer played in stimulating his intellectual progress, and the implication that Schopenhauer is not worthy of being taken seriously is ridiculous in the absence of any additional analysis.

One of Nietzsche's most revealing and neglected works. It should be read by everyone intersested in Nietzsche. He reveals to us that every great philosopher has one true undelying thought that is deeply intertwined with their personality. He then proceeds to explore each of the great Greek philosophers with this theme in mind. Not only do we learn about the Greeks but we learn a great deal about Nietzsche in some of his most lucid and straight forward prose.

This book has much of interest to say about various Greek philosophers but precious little to say of Nietzsche's method of proceeding. Of that Nietzsche says, in the preface that "philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only. For all subsequent philosophers they usually represent one great mistake, for lesser minds a sum of errors and truths. Taken as ultimate ends, in any event, they represent an error..." In this book Nietzsche focuses on one point - "a slice of personality" - in several philosophers in order to reveal ...what? - Personal mood, color, personality, as he says in the first preface? But in a second preface he refers to the incompleteness of this approach. Still, he says, "the only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element. It alone is forever irrefutable." By the time he writes Beyond Good & Evil this `personal' element (a singularity) is revealed as philosophical purpose; which is itself the revealing (or concoction) of ultimate ends.

But of that I am going to say nothing. What I have always found most remarkable in this early work by Nietzsche is the discussion of culture; I mean the relation between philosophy and culture. The healthy culture can exist with even a little philosophy, we are told. And we wonder at the contrast he then [implicitly, perhaps unconsciously] offers between the Greeks and the Romans; "the Romans during their best period lived without philosophy." - But what of non-healthy cultures? "The sick it [philosophy] made even sicker. Wherever a culture was disintegrating, wherever the tension between it and its individual components was slack, philosophy could never re-integrate the individual back into the group." Nietzsche says the Greeks did not stop philosophizing when they should have, and that it was this philosophy (of old age) that made our common philosophical tradition. ...Sigh, nothing dies at the right time, but that is another story.

But the Greeks began (to philosophize) at the right time. And they made use of the cultures around them. "Nothing would be sillier then to claim an autochthonous development for the Greeks. On the contrary, they invariably absorbed other living cultures. The very reason they got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it." The Greek achievement is this throwing the spear further. The fashionable and unfashionable insistence on cultural purity is always a sign of stupidity, laziness and cowardice. "The quest for philosophy's beginnings is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels."

But what if one lives in a sick (by that I mean the individual apart from the group) culture? Can we not go back to the beginning, ala Heidegger, retrace our steps, see what went wrong, correct it and start over? "Everywhere the way to the beginning leads to barbarism. Whoever concerns himself with the Greeks should be ever mindful that the unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as a hatred of knowledge." Nietzsche weaves a cautionary tale about the value of philosophy and knowledge for culture in the opening pages of this essay that is often overlooked in the haste to get to what Nietzsche has to say about this or that Greek philosopher.

Haste is a dreadful thing; the ruin of so many promising beginnings. But can a poor beginning ever be made good again?

The book's key concept would be "a unity of style." By this, Nietzsche seems to mean a power to have "life in lavish perfection before our eyes," a power wherein our desire for "freedom, beauty, and greatness" and our "drive toward truth" are one (p. 33). A culture is healthy when it has such unity of style. In such a culture, philosophy exists in its fullest right, being engaged fully by its members. When it is sick, philosphy is deemed dangerous and philosophers exiles. Or, as Nietzsche says: "During such times philosophy remains the learned monologue of the lonely stroller, the accidental loot of the individual, the secret skeleton in the closet, or the harmless chatter between senile academics and children" (p. 37).

How such unity can be achieved in a philosopher is illustrated by Niezsche in philosophers of 'young' Greece, that is, before Plato. So in Thales ("water is the origin of all things"), we see 1) urges of the religious in his wanting to settle the primal origin of everything, 2) a natural scientist at work, putting his proposition in a language free from image or fable, and 3) a philosopher, in his "metaphysical conviction," or presenting his fundamental concept ("unity" of all things) clothed in a hypothesis ("water" as the source of that unity). In the case of Thales, we may say the unity is two-fold: 1) as to the relation between man and nature. Before Thales, Greeks thought nothing of nature, seeing it as mere semblance, and putting all their faith in men and Gods. It is with Thales that they started to believe in nature as a fundamental part of life, 2) as to varying ways of knowing. Nietzsche notes: "When Thales says, "all is water," man is stung up out of the wormlike probings and creepings-about of his separate sciences. He intuits the ultimate resolution of all things and overcomes, by means of such intuition, the vulgar restrictions of the lower leves of knowledge" (p. 44).

The book is from Nietzsche's early period, written at about the same time as The Birth of Tragedy. Although a very small book, with just over 100 pages, it contains many seeds for such essential Nietzschean concerns and themes as the relation between art, philosophy and life, the role of education in culture, virtues of slow reading, or "how one becomes what one is." Widely neglected, but what Walter Kaufmann said of Beyond Good and Evil would be equally applied to this book. You will encounter "hundreds of doors it opens for the mind, revealing new vistas, problems, and relationships."

I give this work by Nietzsche, minus the "Introduction" by the translator, five stars. This book is proof that a work can be translated without the translator understanding the concepts contained within the original work. It is clear from her introduction that the translator does not have a profound knowledge of Nietzsche and his work as a whole, for this work is best understood in the context of Nietzsche's thought throughout the course of his life, with special emphasis on his work concerning metaphysics. I won't write a long review, however, I recommend this work for anyone with a serious knowledge of Nietzsche, metaphysics, and the Presocratic philosophers.

Nietzsche is a man of genius and "God is dead" philosophy is amazing. This review on ancient greek work is amazing. i would recommend this to any body studying philosophy.

One of Nietzsche's earliest works, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks deals with various pre-Platonic philosophers, such as Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras. Nietzsche esteems these thinkers as being important because they took the first halting steps away from mythology, anthropomorphism, and mysticism, groping for a "scientific" explanation of the cosmos. They wrestled with such ideas and concepts as "being," "non-being," "becoming" (or "coming-to-be"), the indefinite, infinity, time, space, and causality, seeking to explain the "whence" and "wherefore" of the universe. Behind it all was the perennial puzzle that plagued philosophers, metaphysicians, and even some thelogians: "Why is there something rather than nothing."

Nietzsche greatly admired ancient Greek culture, especially when he compared it with the low state of contemporary German culture, and sought by his writings to expose the shallowness of "modern philosophy." He traced his philosophical lineage to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who famously stated, "One cannot step in the same river twice" (in other words, the universe is in a continual state of "becoming" (or coming-to-be). A Greek sentence captures this perspective in capsule form: "Panta rhei, ouden menei" ("All things are flowing, nothing is abiding" or, to paraphrase, "Nothing is permanent except change."). In a later work, Nietzsche showed his strong affinity with Heraclitan flux by saying, "[My project] is to stamp on becoming the seal of being," or, in other words, "Becoming" (an eternal flux] is the only true "Being." Heraclitus viewed the cosmos as "a child's game," much like "an artist's creative play-impulse." Nietzsche apparently would agree, for in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music he wrote, "The world can be justified eternally only as an aesthetic phenomenon."

Parmenides (whom Plato, in the Sophist, called "our father") is, for Nietzsche, the villain of the piece. Parmenides might be called the "grandfather of Western philosophy," for he greatly influenced Plato, the "father of Western philosophy." (Whitehead famously said, "The whole of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato.") For Nietzsche, the philosophy of Parmenides and Plato, which posited "the true world" as opposed to our "actual world," was disastrous for Western philosophy. A wrong turn was made by Parmenides and Plato, and philosophy has never quite recovered from their egregious mistake.

The lion's share of Nietzsche's book goes to an examination of Anaxagoras, for whom Nietzsche shows, surprisingly, a great respect. It is true that a lot of Anaxagoras' "scientific" speculations resemble what modern phyicists speak of as "the big bang" from a "singularity." However, Anaxagoras drug in, as some convenient deus ex machina, the concept of nous (or spirit), which he regarded as the arbitrary, random "mover" of all things. (Compare Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover.) But such a concept smacks of mythology, anthropomorphism, mysticism, and religious gobbledygook. From whence does Anaxagoras derive his celebrated "nous"? The concept sounds much too much like a casui sui (cause of itself), such as the theological concept of "God." Does everything have to have a cause, or did Anaxagoras' "nous" spring full-grown from the head of Zeus? If God created the universe, who or what created God or nous?

Finally, Nietzsche anticipates by many years the intriguing concept of "language-games" and grammatical investigations put forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both of these thinkers aver that we trust much too much in words, concepts, and grammar, and neglect "that which is right before our eyes," that is, the empirical evidence of our senses. In a later work, Nietzsche, the atheist, gives this warning: "We still believe in God because we still believe in grammar."

Fox Nietzsche the 6th and 5th centuries in Greece were indeed a tragic age. He saw in them the rise and climax of values so dear to him that their sub­sequent drop into catastrophe (in the persons of Socrates-Plato) was as clearly foreshadowed as though these were events taking place in the theater.

This book is an account of the personalities in­volved and not a handbook of philosophic doctrines or the history of a certain period in philosophy. Among those included Nietzsche delineates in turn, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaxagoras.
Nietzsche concludes "so much depends on the de­velopment of Greek culture because our entire occidental world has received its initial stimuli from it.. . . One must know the younger Greece in great detail in order to differentiate it from the older. There are many possibilities which have not yet been discovered because the Greeks did not dis­cover them . . . others have discovered the Greeks and later covered them up again."