Socrates and Nitia

I’m still out of town, wandering through the desert and the mountain-peaks (no, seriously). I’ll be home next week, but for now it’s still adaptations from my articles on Medium. This one also began as an essay on reddit and was eventually polished into the form you hear it in now: Nietzsche versus Socrates. Upon looking it over again, this essay is actually quite comprehensive in assessing Nietzsche’s view of The Old Gadfly of Athens. “Socrates, to confess is frankly, is so close to me that almost always I fight a fight against him.” Nietzsche’s thoughts on Socrates are complex, but this is the closest one can get in a single sentence to Nietzsche’s relationship with him. In this episode, which consists of a reading of the essay, we’ll examine Socrates from various angles: as the philosopher of life, as the critic, as the martyr, as the decadent, and finally — as what Nietzsche calls, a “destiny”, as a great-souled individual who left his mark on the hearts and minds of men throughout time.