Nietzsche Versus Paul

What is amazing about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gratitude it exudes: it is a very noble type of man that confronts nature and life in this way. Later, when the rabble gained the upper hand in Greece, fear became rampant in religion, too—and the ground was prepared for Christianity.

—Beyond Good and Evil, 49

My task concerns reconstructing the Nietzschean history of Christianity. This aphorism gives us the best access to this task in terms of its possibility, actors, substance, and movement. Nietzsche unfolds in this aphorism his vivid retrospective observation of the development of Christianity. From the viewpoint of feeling, religion is being enacted by two types of men, noble and rabble. There are, in accordance with this, two types of religion: a noble-religion whose essence is the feeling of gratitude, and a rabble-religion whose essence is the feeling of fear. Moreover, the latent understanding of the history of Christianity in terms of class political history exhibits this history as one leading toward Christianity as the religion of the fearful rabble.

Gratitude is a feeling of satisfaction immediately expressing itself before that which is held to be the cause of this feeling. And ancient Greek religion is the expression of satisfaction before its gods. The feeling of satisfaction, the expression of which Nietzsche speaks here, is not the feeling of satisfaction from an optimal state of life. Nietzsche rather refers to the expression of satisfaction from nature and life given as they are. The enormous abundance of gratitude is an expression of the affirmation of life. Religious thankfulness is the religious expression of the affirmation of life.

But how does satisfaction from life and nature become a matter of expression? More precisely, how does it become a matter of religious expression? Expressing gratitude necessarily involves self-consciousness of one’s state of satisfaction. Man first reflects on life so as to be able to conclude that it is satisfactory, and only then can one turn to thank the gods as that which may be held, thought, or imagined to be the cause of the life thought to be satisfactory. Hence, through religious thankfulness, man turns to thank the gods thought to be the cause of a satisfying life. But how does man’s thankfulness for life take a religious expression? Nietzsche’s answer to this question is that the satisfaction is so great that man’s feeling of thankfulness is enormous and abundant, and man therefore cannot think of turning to offer such an intense feeling of thankfulness but to some deity. As Nietzsche writes, “Meaning of religion: the failing and the unhappy should be preserved, and through an improvement of the mood (hope and fear) be kept away from suicide. Or for the noble: a surplus of gratitude and elevation, which is greater than to be offered to humans.”1 The matching between noble and gratitude, on the one hand, and between rabble and fear (and hope), on the other hand, correlates to that which makes the sense of religion. A religion of thankfulness comes into existence at the moment in which the noble’s feelings of thankfulness and elevation are great to a degree where offering such feelings to humans is not anymore proportional.

Assuming that ancient Greek religion is the starting point of the history of Christianity entails (from Nietzsche’s same retrospective viewpoint) that ancient Greek religion establishes the axis around which the history of Christianity evolves through time. How should this axis be defined? Insofar as ancient Greek religion is an expression of the affirmation of life, the history of Christianity is, at the very least, a history of responsiveness. For the affirmation of life, or yes-saying (Bejahung), is an answer to a question. In addition, as yes-saying assumes another possibility—the possibility of negating life—the axis around which the history of Christianity revolves is that question in front of which man ends up affirming or negating life.

What is that question? In the “Sinn der Religion”2 we read that religion emerges on the basis of man’s consciousness of himself as finite (vis-à-vis infinity). Following man’s failure and unhappiness, man can commit suicide, and man’s possible suicide is man’s consciousness of himself as finite insofar as such an act of suicide is retained back through man’s repossession of infinity through the hope in, and the fear of, the beyond. Also, man’s feeling of himself as being smaller than to be thanked (for the satisfactory life one lives) is man’s consciousness of himself as finite, insofar as this feeling of smallness leads man to go beyond finitude in thanking the gods. In the moment in which man has religion, man is already at the standpoint in which the value of life is questioned, that is, conceived in terms of possibility in relation, and in comparison, with a totality that is infinity. Religion is that turning point at which the immediacy of life loses its absoluteness. Religion appears in the moment in which “the trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem.”³ The Nietzschean history of Christianity is the history of the answers given to the question of the value of life: the answers that affirm or negate life by way of attributing to it an absolute or relative value respectively.

“The outstanding element, however, out of which an interpretation of history could arise at all, is the basic experience of evil and suffering, and of man’s quest for happiness. The interpretation of history is, in the last analysis, an attempt to understand the meaning of history as the meaning of suffering by historical action.”4 How, then, is the Nietzschean history of Christianity one about the value of life and about the problem of suffering? From this perspective, this history becomes the history of pessimism. The history of pessimism is the history of the answers given to the question of the value of life from the point of view of the problem of suffering. Pessimism is not the mere reflection on the value of life, but rather the reflection on the value of life as suffering. For Nietzsche, suffering remains a constant of which denial and affirmation are but variables.⁵ Through the definition of the history of pessimism as the history of Christianity, it becomes the history of the answers given to the problem of suffering as they revolve around Christianity’s answer to this question. In this way, the reconstruction of the Nietzschean history of Christianity comprises three components: (1) Greek and Jewish pre-Christian history as one leading to Christianity; (2) Christianity itself; and (3) post-Christian history, or Modernity, as a conclusion of Christianity.⁶

The first expression of pessimism as the reflection on the value of life from the point of view of suffering appears in the moment in which ancient Greek religion gives birth to Dionysian tragedy:

The psychology of the orgy as an overflowing feeling of life and energy within which even pain acts as a stimulus provided me with the key to the concept of the tragic feeling. … Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes. … Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet.⁷

Dionysian suffering turns into a stimulus to affirm life as suffering. It is on the basis of the appearance of suffering in the Dionysian cult before the joyful Greek consciousness that Dionysian tragedy emerges to represent Greek pessimism as an affirmation of suffering-life.8 Suffering becomes the standpoint from which the ancient Greeks reflect on the question of the value of life. And it is on the basis of this reflection that tragedy appears as a form of affirmative art. Dionysian tragedy expresses “a strong pessimism … [an] intellectual preference for the hard”⁹ and shows “how the Greeks got over their pessimism, how they overcame it.”¹⁰

Nietzsche’s usage of the expression “strong pessimism,” referring to Dionysian tragedy, stands behind my definition of the history of Christianity as a history of pessimism, and as one that includes Dionysian tragedy. This definition does not contradict Nietzsche’s statement that tragedy does not provide evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes. The Greeks were pessimists insofar as they had the preference to reflect upon suffering-life. Nevertheless, the Greeks affirmed life. The Greeks were not pessimists in the way that Schopenhauer, and the Schopenhauerian Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, portrayed them. Their pessimist reflection upon suffering-life did not result in the negation of life.¹¹ This is the Greek joyful Dionysian solution to the question of pessimism, to the riddle posed by the existence of absurd, pointless, nauseating suffering.¹²

Here, within this reconstruction of Nietzsche’s history of Christianity, Dionysian tragedy stands as the model for all forms of art. The significance of Dionysian tragedy does not stand on the uniqueness of the form of (Dionysian) tragic art, or as that specific form of art opposing the Apollonian as another form of art, as it appears in Nietzsche’s early Birth of Tragedy. Dionysian tragedy is the model for all forms of art, insofar as Nietzsche’s conception of the experience of the artist as such can provide a life-affirming Weltanschauung alternative to the life-negating Platonic-Christian one:¹³ “The ‘Dionysus’ in the Dionysus versus Apollo of Nietzsche’s first book and the ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’ in the last line of Nietzsche’s last book do not mean the same thing. The later Dionysus is the synthesis of the two forces represented by Dionysus and Apollo in The Birth of Tragedy.”¹⁴

What are the implications of the appearance of suffering before Greek consciousness in the sphere of art for the history of Christianity? I mentioned that the Greeks formulate their life-affirming answer to the question of the value of suffering-life in tragedy as the model of art in view of the appearance of suffering in the cult of Dionysius. Does this mean that Dionysian suffering remains absent from the Greeks’ everyday political and social reality (the Apollonian reality-dream announced in The Birth of Tragedy)? Yes. Dionysian suffering does not appear before Greek consciousness in reality. In reality, Dionysian suffering is that which is not. It is that which exists but does not appear. As such, suffering owes its existence to the assumption of the Dionysian in reality, to assuming the totality of being to be more than that which appears.

However, the affirmation of life bridges together the order of appearance and the order of existence. The Dionysian affirmation brings suffering to appearance in the reality in which it exists. The Dionysian produces suffering as that which is not (the happiness of satisfaction) and as that which belongs to it as a de facto totality. The origin of the Dionysian is the consciousness of the absence of suffering in a reality whose totality demands its production. The Dionysian affirmation of life, or the affirmation of life as such, does not stop at the limit of the mere acknowledgment of suffering as that which belongs to life. The affirmation of life produces suffering necessarily. The Dionysian brings into life that which is not (suffering) so as to affirm the totality of life. Pain, sacrifice, terror, destruction, and the like act as stimuli of the overflowing feeling of life producing them:15

Yes, what is Dionysian? … Where must the opposite [to the yearning for beauty] and chronologically earlier yearning have originated, the yearning for the ugly, the earlier Hellene’s good severe will towards pessimism, towards the tragic myth, towards the image of everything fearful, evil, enigmatic, destructive, disastrous at the basis of existence—where must tragedy have originated? Perhaps in joy, in strength, in overflowing health, in an excess of abundance?¹⁶

If that is the case, what are the implications of the fact that Dionysian suffering is that absence made into presence in reality for the interpretation of the Dionysian within the history of Christianity? Insofar as the Dionysian forms the starting point of the history of pessimism, the Dionysian itself lacks any historical understanding of itself. For, as the beginning of a history yet to be, the Dionysian cannot foresee itself within such history. The result is that all historical understating of the Dionysian depends totally on later answers to the problem of pessimism, since such answers possess what the Dionysian lacks, that is, a retrospective view of the Dionysian. From here it follows that the belonging of the Dionysian to an order other than that of history makes the Dionysian susceptible to alternative interpretations that manipulate its original meaning of suffering. In addition, in view of its initial otherness as the origin of its later historical identity, the Dionysian cannot be said to belong to the order of morality either as evil or as good. For the initial oneness of the Dionysian locates it outside the binary logic of good and evil, according to which both good and evil are mutually dependent.

Thus, once introduced to the dialectics of good and evil, the Dionysian necessarily loses its initial extramoral character. As will be detailed, the later moral Platonic-Christian meaning of suffering attributes to the Dionysian affirmation of life the identity of evil, insofar as it attributes to itself the identity of the good. Within Platonic-Christian morality, the Dionysian is transformed into evil in view of its affirmation of life. I mentioned that the affirmation of life as such produces suffering; thus, if suffering is said to be evil, then that which produces suffering (the Dionysian) is evil. To summarize, the Dionysian, which does not know of its (later) other, exists outside the morality of good and evil;17 and the location of the Dionysian within the morality of good and evil ends necessarily in interpreting the Dionysian as evil.

But the concept of evil with which Platonism refers to the Dionysian is distinct from that of Christianity. On the one hand, Plato’s view is that the Dionysian is evil, producing suffering in the form of pure illusion on the stage of tragedy. For Christian slave-morality, on the other hand, the Dionysian is that evil producing suffering as reality. Accordingly, it is not the true or untrue nature of the Dionysian that unites the Platonic and the Christian. The third section of this chapter will argue that the unity of these two is inherent in their own inner matter and will attend in greater detail to the different ways in which the Dionysian becomes evil for Platonism and Christianity taken together and separately. But for now, the crucial point is that the Dionysian Weltanschauung itself does not mark any limits between reality and the tragic stage. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche expresses this idea in his view of the chorus as the essence of Dionysian tragedy:

The chorus is on the stage and outside it, being both actor and spectator. This state of being between creates the possibility of exiting everyday Apollonian dream-reality and returning back to reality with a Buddhist asceticism to be overcome in a new Dionysian Weltanschauung of reality. The constancy of this view in the late Nietzsche is revealed, first, in Nietzsche’s departure from the location of the Dionysian in the framework of its dialectics with the Apollonian. This dialectics is captured by the early idea of the entrance of the chorus into the Dionysian tragedy and its exit to another as another reality. Second, in view of his artist’s criticism of art as seen from the viewpoint of the spectator, Nietzsche paints the totality of life as tragically Dionysian and as artistically Dionysian. In this way, the affirmation of the illusory culminates in its becoming the only reference to truth: “We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! With the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!”19

For Nietzsche, Socrates constitutes the “turning point”²⁰ from Greek Dionysian tragedy to what I want to call Greek Christianity, that is, to Plato as a Christian before Christianity.²¹ If the turning point at which Nietzsche’s Socrates is located is one in between Dionysian tragedy and Christianity—as possibly Dionysian tragic and not tragic, and as possibly Christian and not Christian—does this mean that Nietzsche’s Socrates is extrahistorical? And if that is correct, could one think of this extrahistorical character of Nietzsche’s Socrates as that which constitutes the basis for the possibility of the shift in the history of Christianity from Dionysian tragedy to Platonic Christianity?²²

These questions highlight the significance of Socrates for Nietzsche’s history of Christianity. Indeed, Nietzsche’s attitude toward Socrates is a focal point of his thought and reflects his views of reason and morality as well as the image of man he envisaged.²³ And as this history revolves around the meaning of suffering, the figure of Nietzsche’s Socrates should be approached in relation to the meaning of Socrates’s suffering, or the meaning of his death. What is at stake here is the question of the unity of the life and death of Nietzsche’s Socrates as seen from the viewpoint of the death of Socrates. This is the unity in which the life of Socrates acquires some meaning in accordance with the meaning attributed to suffering in his death.

Socrates is a philosopher. He is in fact the philosopher par excellence.24 And in relation to tragedy, Nietzsche gives the following definition of the philosopher as such in The Twilight of the Idols, just before he opens the chapter “The Problem of Socrates”: “Can an ass be tragic?—To be crushed by a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? … The case of the philosopher.”²⁵ Nietzsche’s question is rhetorical. He is asserting here that the philosopher as such is an ass, and this is how he cannot be tragic—he cannot be crushed by a burden one can neither bear nor throw off. Nietzsche is positing a contrast between philosophy and tragedy. Additionally, his question “can an ass be tragic?” or, to put it otherwise, “can a philosopher be tragic?” speaks of the philosopher’s attempt to become tragic. From here it also follows that something seems to forbid the philosopher from becoming tragic.

This contrast between philosophy and tragedy points in the direction of Socrates, or more precisely the Socrates of The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche criticizes Socrates’s attempts in the field of tragedy.²⁶ To grasp the meaning of the problem of Socrates the philosopher as a case of an impossible tragedian, the following proposition is useful: what forbids the philosopher as such from becoming tragic is that which makes of the philosopher an ass. Nietzsche’s denotes the philosopher as an ass not to refer to his wisdom as foolish, but rather as “unwisdom.”²⁷ Besides that, Nietzsche’s characterization of the philosopher as an ass is meant to refer to the yoke or burden that the philosopher carries, as the ass does. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche refers to wisdom and burden using this same vocabulary: “Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior. Ye say to me, ‘Life is hard to bear.’ But why would you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening? Life is hard to bear; but do not act so tenderly! We are all of us fair beasts of burden, male and female asses.”²⁸

Nietzsche instructs us that the philosopher is an ass in view of bearing the burden of life. And the burden of life is the burden of suffering: life is hard to bear. Likewise, Socrates the philosopher goes on carrying this burden if he does not “believe … in a god who could dance,”29 if he does not believe in Dionysus. Thus, when Socrates the philosopher dies, his death is the death of an ass. The death of Socrates the philosopher is not a tragic death. For Nietzsche, the problem of Socrates is the problem of suffering. And the answer that philosophy gives to this problem keeps the burden on the back of the philosophical ass until his nontragic death. That which forbids the philosopher as such from the possibility of being tragic lies in the meaning that philosophy gives to the problem of Socrates, to his suffering, to his illness, and to his death, as a nontragic answer.

For Nietzsche, the problem of philosophy, in connection with the question about the meaning of suffering, is that of the meaning which philosophy attributes to the death of Socrates the philosopher. From the perspective of the history of Christianity, Socrates is the turning point from Dionysian tragedy to Christianity insofar as Socrates is the place in which a new meaning of suffering, as an alternative to the tragic one, is made possible. Socrates makes Socratism possible.³⁰ If the death of Socrates is the culmination of the life of Socrates, then the unity of Socrates’s life and death constitutes the phenomenon whose interpretation gives birth to the Platonic-Christian meaning of suffering. This implies that Socrates the man, his life and death, is otherworldly in the sense that it does not belong to the history of Christianity in itself. Socrates is not given to historical understanding as he is and as what he is. Socrates can belong to the history of Christianity in a double form, and only in this double from: as Platonic, which is to say as interpreted by Plato, and as the sign that this interpretation refers to.³¹

This explains how Nietzsche’s figure of Socrates the man is out there, and it is different from its interpretation:

Socrates was no physician and no savior. And interpreting him in this way is self-deception and a misunderstanding. Here appears the gap between Nietzsche’s Socrates the man and the subsequent optimistic interpretation of Socrates. The truth is, Nietzsche says, the wisdom in Socrates’s decision to die is its being the right decision after being sick for a long time. For Nietzsche, this is all that truly constitutes the unity of the life and death of Socrates the man. In fact, Nietzsche describes Socrates and his fellow Athenians as decadents who are aware of their décadence. But Socrates’s fellows and followers misunderstood his death in interpreting it as if it were resulting from the proposition “rationality at any cost.” In this way the death of Socrates acquired the following (wrong) meaning:

Socrates … appears to us as the first man who was able not only to live according to that instinct of science, but—what is more significant by far—also to die according to it: and so the image of the dying Socrates, the man elevated above the fear of death through knowledge and reasoning, is the heraldic shield hung above the entrance gate to science in order to remind everyone of its purpose, namely to make existence appear intelligible and so justified.³³

Nietzsche asks: “Did he himself [Socrates] grasp that, this shrewdest of all self-deceivers? … He said softly to himself: ‘death alone is a physician here. … Socrates himself has only been a long time sick.’”34 Here, Nietzsche seems to be asking: to which party does Socrates himself belong? Does he belong to Nietzsche’s side? Did he himself grasp the gap between himself (that is, Nietzsche’s Socrates the man, being sick for a long time and for whom death alone is a physician)³⁵ and his misunderstanding? If that is the case, Nietzsche thinks that he should have kept this truth to himself, that he should have said it softly to himself. Nietzsche is not sure whether Socrates’s Socrates is Nietzsche’s Socrates. Nietzsche is unsure whether the problem of Socrates is Nietzsche’s own problem,³⁶ whether Socrates himself knew the Nietzschean truth of his own death or whether he had deceived himself and misunderstood himself in the same way that the Athenians misunderstood him. For it could be the other way around; Socrates may be keeping his secret from Nietzsche: “What is the meaning of all science anyway, viewed as a symptom of life? … Is the scientific approach perhaps only a fear and an evasion of pessimism? … And in moral terms, something like faint-heartedness and falsehood? In amoral terms, a sly move? O Socrates, Socrates, might this have been your secret? O most secret ironist, might this have been your—irony?”³⁷

Up to this point, Nietzsche’s truth about the death of Nietzsche’s Socrates includes the following: it is not a tragic death, it is not martyrdom, and its true meaning remains a secret. Besides that, this death becomes meaningless after Nietzsche disqualifies the meaning so far attributed to it as misunderstanding. The meaninglessness of the death of Nietzsche’s Socrates implies that death simply ended the life of a suffering, sick man called Socrates. Nietzsche evokes continuity between the meaninglessness of the death of Socrates and his life as a sick man. As such, the life of Socrates becomes meaningless.

It is clear that the unity of the life and death of Socrates attained through the meaninglessness of his death produces a gap between his simple death and his celebrated scientific life. Accordingly, in keeping with the interpretation of Socrates’s life and death from the viewpoint of his death, there remains the possibility of bridging the gap between Socrates’s celebrated life and his simple death by way of considering his death a matter of pure accident. But Socrates was subjected to a trial for something wrong he did in his life. Socrates went to his death with courage and without fear. The death of Socrates was not inevitable but the choice of an ass to unburden itself: “once he had been summoned before the forum of the Greek state, only one form of sentence was imperative—exile. … But that a sentence of death rather than one of exile only was passed seems to have been brought about by Socrates himself, with complete clarity and without the natural horror in the face of death.”38

The death of Socrates is a simple fact but cannot remain so. Rather, it should have an interpretation. The previously mentioned misunderstanding of Socrates’s death is the only interpretation Nietzsche offers. Nietzsche, who cannot penetrate the secret of the ironic Socrates, cannot provide an alternative, meaningful interpretation of this death. Thus, Nietzsche concludes that the death of Nietzsche’s Socrates is an act of tyranny: “Socrates wanted to die—it was not Athens, it was he who handed himself the poison cup, who compelled Athens to hand him the poison cup.”³⁹ The fact remains that Socrates’s death, rather than his life, demands an interpretation. Nietzsche has no alternative interpretation. The misinterpretation of Socrates does not necessarily belong to Nietzsche’s Socrates the man; and yet, it is what this man demanded in the form of a tyrannical dictation.⁴⁰

From the moment of his death until Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s Socrates determines the history of Christianity as a history of misunderstanding. This is exactly the significance of Nietzsche’s Socrates as a turning point in the history of Christianity. Nietzsche’s Socrates the man does not belong to Dionysian tragedy. The unity of this man is meaningless. In addition, as one following Dionysian tragedy and as meaningless, this unity turns the history of Christianity from Dionysian tragedy to Platonic Christianity in its dictation of the Platonic-Christian misunderstanding as its only possible interpretation.

Nietzsche does try to reveal science in its original form in the context of the problem of Socrates. I shall discuss his attempt to reconstruct this original character of science, as one parallel to Dionysian tragedy and from the Christian tradition. Nietzsche reads in the Bible what I call paradisiacal science.41 For the moment, I am assuming that Nietzsche realizes such a task on the basis of the fact that Socrates remained a secret for him, since Nietzsche never quite resolved his preoccupation with Socrates as both a thinker and a personality.⁴² Yet, Socratic science and science in paradise have something in common. Both Socrates, as a sign, and Socratic science remain extrahistorical. Socratic science is original in relation to its (misunderstanding) interpretation. Similarly, insofar as science in paradise is prehistorical, it is given as extrahistorical. It is original in relation to its later historical interpretation by the negation of priesthood. Thus, for Nietzsche, if a hermeneutic of the Platonic text does not render the revelation of the original Socratic science possible, a hermeneutics of the Bible seems to render such an original form of science possible.

The ancient theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge” … or, more clearly, of instinct and reason … this is still the ancient moral problem that first emerged in the person of Socrates. … [who] found. … [that] one must follow the instincts but persuade reason to assist them with good reasons. … Plato … wanted … to prove to himself that reason and instinct of themselves tend toward one goal, the good, “God.” And since Plato, all theologians and philosophers are on the same track—that is, in moral matters it has so far been instinct, or what the Christians call “faith,” or “the herd,” as I put it, that has triumphed. … Reason is merely an instrument.⁴⁴

For Nietzsche, as for Nietzsche’s Socrates, reason is an instrument in the hands of the instincts.45 And it is from this perspective that the Platonic truth and the Christian faith are instincts. And, as different from Nietzsche (and Socrates), both Platonism and Christianity conceive of reason as tending with the Platonic instinct (truth) and with the Christian instinct (faith) toward the same goal, toward the good God. And if the goal of the Platonic instinct is identical with that of the Christian faith, then those two can be said to be identical. How, then, does it happen that the same Platonic-Christian instinct (the instinct of the herd) is elevated to truth in Platonism, while being baptized as faith in Christianity? Does this remaining difference between truth and faith point to any substantial difference between Platonism and Christianity beyond their reduction?

To further elaborate on this issue, it must be clarified how reason becomes an instrument for the Platonic instinct (as truth) as well as an instrument for the Christian instinct (as faith). Nietzsche provides the following insight into this question: “Christianity. … knows that it is itself a matter of absolute indifference whether a thing be true, but a matter of the highest importance to what extent it is believed to be true.” Through reason, one seeks to bring one’s instinct toward “happiness,” or, to bring it to meet its goal (the good God in the cases of Platonism and Christianity). But the way sought to bring the instinct as faith to meet its goal is other than the way sought to bring the instinct as truth to meet this same goal: “Truth and the belief that something is true … [are] two completely diverse worlds of interest, almost antithetical worlds—one gets to them by fundamentally different roads.” It is feeling that differentiates these two roads. In Platonism, only reason brings the instinct as truth to know, or meet its goal. In Christianity, it is primary feeling, the feeling that something is true, which brings the instinct to meet its goal. Thus, Christianity becomes theology (that is, turns to use reason as its instrument) only after its instinct meets its goal in feeling. In addition, if it is “belief as such which is necessary above all else, then one has to bring reason, knowledge, inquiry into disrepute: the road to truth becomes the forbidden road.” In this moment, Nietzsche adds, faith substitutes the subsequently adopted road of knowledge with the road of hope: “hope is a much stronger stimulant to life than any single instance of happiness which actually occurs.”46

But it has been said that the Platonic instinct is identical to the Christian one. If that is the case, how does it happen that the Platonic instinct remains “satisfied” with reason as its only instrument to know its good God, while the Christian instinct turns to hope as an alternative instrument after reason? As Nietzsche anticipates in the above passage, Christianity’s world of interest is not truth at all; for it is belief as such that is necessary above all else. In addition, reason, as an instrument, can also serve instincts other than the Christian one. And as reason is dialectical, such other instincts, once they come to confront the Christian instinct, may make their inquiry into actuality and thereby refute the Christian instinct’s claim to truth (to truth as that which results from using the instrument of reason). Thus, the Christian faith turns to hope: “Sufferers have to be sustained by a hope which cannot be refuted by any actuality—which is not done away with by any fulfillment: a hope in the Beyond.”⁴⁷

If Platonic philosophy did not assume the common essence of reason and instinct, it could have never become popular in Christianity. For then Christianity would have had to identify Platonic reason as an instrument, and not as truth identical to its faith. On this same basis, it follows that if Christianity had not made this same assumption, Christianity could never have become Platonic. It is then on the basis of the idea of the instrumentality of reason that Nietzsche conceives of the unity of Platonism and Christianity as one based on their agreement upon the idea of the common essence of reason and instinct. This includes the common identity of the Platonic instinct with the Christian one. How does Nietzsche come to construct this identity? I will assume, for the moment, that what constitutes the essence of the Christian faith, for Nietzsche, is the formula “god on the cross.”48 This formula puts Christianity’s answer to the problem of suffering as follows: suffering is good, suffering is divine. Suffering is the way to salvation in the other-world. The Christian faith then negates life although it affirms suffering. It does not affirm suffering for itself (it does not affirm life as suffering), but instead affirms suffering with the purpose of affirming the other-world, and thereby negates this-world.

Platonism shares this conception only in part. On the one hand, the common ground of Platonism and Christianity is the negation of life as suffering, as it is presented in the idea of the possibility of overcoming this-world’s suffering in the other-world’s salvation. On the other hand, insofar as Platonism approaches the problem of suffering in a way different from the way in which Christianity approaches it, Platonism, unlike Christianity, does not attribute any positive value to suffering. I shall seek to prove this claim by referring to Nietzsche’s evaluation of Plato’s thought on the problem of suffering. Nietzsche says that “judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against”—whether those of Socrates and Plato against life or those of Nietzsche for life—“can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms—in themselves such judgments are stupidities.”⁴⁹ The value of these judgments may concern the historian of philosophy or the cultural physician as symptoms of culture’s state of health. And in the case in which these judgments are the thought of the problem of suffering, that is, seen as a problem in the value of life, Nietzsche—as a historian or as a physician—turns to examine the possibility that the thinker of such judgments, who “stood—had to stand—in … [a] negative relation to life,” is a decadent.⁵⁰

The mention of Socrates here together with Plato is completely coherent with the discussion of Socrates above, in terms of the possibility of reading the life of Nietzsche’s Socrates—that is, science—as being one outside the Platonic dialogue.⁵¹ The case here concerns Plato’s thought only and does not concern Nietzsche’s Socrates the man. It is the case of Socrates insofar as Socrates is Platonically interpreted, that is, Socrates according to the “consensus sapientium”⁵² between Socrates and Plato, or philosophy as a tradition, extending before and after Plato, spelling the truth of the person of Plato, or his own instinct: “I, Plato, am the truth.”⁵³

The consensus of wise men of which Nietzsche speaks here is nothing but the instinct of Plato made, by Plato, into the truth. And for Nietzsche, Plato—like Socrates—was born into Greek culture in its late, sick stage. For Nietzsche, this stage demands the acceptance of the option of death as its only proper conclusion. And this, precisely, was Socrates’s option.54 But Plato’s option was different. In addition to his view of life as problematic, Plato suggests transcending this-life by way of turning to an alternative world, a turn for which this-life should be corrected. To correct this-life, or to live a good life, is to live the life of the Platonic philosopher, namely, according to the teaching of the Platonic moral metaphysics of good and evil. The Platonic moral metaphysics instructs us to live this-life as body and soul, making the body a slave of the teleology of the experience of the soul. In such a moral metaphysics, this-life of the soul is the experience of recollecting its earlier knowledge in the other-world toward its return to that world, or the world of pure forms (truth, goodness, beauty, and so on): “[The soul] is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, as it has no willing association with the body in life, but avoided it and gathered itself together by itself and always practiced this, which is no other than practicing philosophy in the right way, in fact, training to die easily. Or is this not training for death?”⁵⁵

The chains and the cave, namely, the body and this-world, become unavoidable evils in face of the possibility that the philosopher dies easily. If easy death means to suffer death less, and if this good death is the end of good life, then good life is easy life, to suffer life less, to live life less: “The soul of the true philosopher thinks that this deliverance must not be opposed and so keeps away from pleasures and desires and pains as far as he can; he reflects that violent pleasure or pain or passion does not cause merely such evils as one might expect, such as one suffers when one has been sick or extravagant through desire, but the greatest and most extreme evil, though one does not reflect on this.”⁵⁶

This-life, as given, is not a mere obstacle before the true end of the good life of the philosopher’s soul. This-life, if lived more than “the less” it should be lived as good life, is the cause of the greatest and worst of all evils. Platonic philosophy defines this-life’s suffering as pure evil. The Platonic view of suffering, of life as suffering, is different from the view of Dionysian tragedy, whose response to pessimism affirms suffering in its affirmation of life as suffering. Furthermore, this view is different from the view of the Christian faith, which places suffering in the framework of its dialectics of salvation. Platonism gives suffering a negative value according to which nothing good can be attributed either to this-life as given or to suffering, whether those taken alone or together.

What explains the negative character of this-life’s evil from Plato’s perspective is the way in which Platonic philosophy approaches the problem of suffering. Platonism’s approach to the problem of suffering is not direct, but instead starts with the question of how happiness is possible. Plato’s “doctrine of identity (happiness = virtue = knowledge). … [has the] right way of life … [as one that] want[s] happiness, [it does not turn] away from happiness.”57 This Platonic formulation of the possibility of the good life as one that does not ignore (turn away from) happiness, or does not turn happiness into a problem, approaches the problem of suffering negatively, or as the lack of happiness.

The opposition between Dionysian tragedy and Platonic philosophy is a late construction. Dionysian tragedy and Platonic philosophy approach pessimism—the question of the value of life as suffering—from two different points of view. The Dionysian approaches pessimism from the viewpoint of the problem of suffering, ignoring the meaning of happiness, while Platonism approaches the same question from the viewpoint of the problem of happiness, ignoring the meaning of suffering. Happiness for the Dionysian and suffering for Platonism are empty, negative concepts. As such, they lack that content which may place them as terms of an opposition.

The picture of this first encounter changes as soon as Platonism asks: if this-life as suffering is meaningless evil—or good-less evil—what would then be the meaning of that which attributes a (positive) meaning to suffering? It is through this questioning (“Plato’s question about the moral meaning of art”)58 that Plato conceives of tragic art, and of art in general, as the pessimist alternative and Weltanschauung opposite to his optimism:

If you reflect, first, that the part of the soul that is forcibly controlled in our private misfortunes and that hungers for the satisfaction of weeping and wailing, because it desires these things by nature, is the very part that receives satisfaction and enjoyment from poets, and, second, that the part of ourselves that is best by nature, since it hasn’t been adequately educated either by reason or habit, relaxes its guard over the lamenting part when it is watching the suffering of somebody else. … I suppose that only a few are able to figure out that enjoyment of other people’s suffering is necessarily transformed to our own and that the pitying part, if it is nourished and strengthened on the suffering of others, won’t be easily held in check when we ourselves suffer.⁵⁹

This opposition between philosophy and tragic poetry, which Plato claims to be in continuity with the “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry and which Nietzsche claims to be a Platonic construction, is extended to the opposition between philosophy and art in general as a third level of reality.⁶⁰ This enmity between philosophy and art concerns the practical (or the moral) aspect of reality.

The insight into the opposition between Platonism and Dionysian tragedy as a Platonic construction shows how Nietzsche’s proposition “Dionysus versus the Crucified”61 cannot be fully understood without understanding his conception of Plato as a Christian before Christianity. It is true, as has been previously argued, that the Christian faith goes beyond Platonism in attributing a dialectically positive value to suffering. This addition can explain the opposition between Dionysus and Christ in view of the end that each of these parties pursues through their affirmation of suffering. Were Dionysus and Christ taken without reference to Platonism, the opposition between them should be understood as one between the Dionysian affirmation of suffering for this-world and the Christian affirmation of suffering for the other-world. But such a formulation does not explain how Christ opposes the Dionysian as art. It is only after Nietzsche holds Plato to be a Christian that the Dionysian continues to be art within the opposition of Dionysus versus the Crucified. Here, Nietzsche’s insight into the historical continuity between Platonism and Christianity becomes highly relevant:

1. The real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man—he dwells in it, he is it. (Oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, convincing. Transcription of the proposition “I, Plato, am the truth.”)

2. The real world, unattainable for the moment, but promised for the wise, the pious, the virtuous man (“to the sinner who repents”). (Progress of the idea: it grows more refined, more enticing, more incomprehensible—it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian.)⁶²

The attainability of the presence of the other-world in which Plato dwells is lost in Christianity. The real world in which Plato lives as his own actual world becomes, in Christianity, a promised future, a hope, a belief in a reality to be. The Christian faith is Plato’s instinct as hope. The transformation of Plato’s instinct in the Christian belief in the real world to be is the transformation of the kind of certainty matching the possibility of the real world. Plato’s knowledge of his real world as good is transformed into the Christian’s feeling of her this-world as sinful.⁶³ And as soon as Platonic truth becomes Christian hope, it acquires its Christian dogmatic character as eternal, that is, as “Egyptianism. … and monotono-theism.”⁶⁴