Thus Spoke… Friedrich Nietzsche on the Sophists

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche can be an awkward topic for classicists and ancient philosophers, especially since an important part of his heavily critical philosophy begins as a reaction to, and critique of, his contemporary classical scholarship with which he was intimately familiar, being one of the most impressive ‘products’ of its development. Nietzsche was a thinker who in many ways turned the prevalent opinions about Greeks and contemporaries upside down, challenging his predecessors and successors with provocative readings of some of the most cherished philosophies in Western culture. This essay examines Nietzsche’s treatment of sophists—an important group of intellectuals whose reception had suffered greatly under the devastating judgement of Plato and Aristotle. While recent scholarship frequently regards sophists as philosophers, Nietzsche’s contemporaries were generally extremely dismissive of this group and regarded them in negative light as illegitimate thinkers and opponents to their contemporary ‘true’ philosophers (i.e., Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). This paper traces two different moments in Nietzsche’s philosophical output that exhibit closer engagement with the sophists: the ‘early’ Nietzsche regards sophists as innovators in language and style, the ‘late’ Nietzsche sees them as countercultural revolutionaries. Despite the fact that in both stages, sophists are introduced as champions for ideas that are central to Nietzsche’s own philosophical preoccupations (the development of language, the overthrowing of values), his treatment of this group of intellectuals appears at first sight superficial and surprisingly unenthusiastic. The paper will examine our existing sources on Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists and will suggest, ultimately, that his engagement with them was probably far more complex and multilayered than has been thus far assumed.

1. Introduction: Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition

Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher who hardly needs an introduction, even outside of the academic community. Known mostly for his uncompromising criticism of the Western philosophical and critical tradition, in particular of morality and religion, as well as for his emphasis on art and individualism, Nietzsche’s published works are nothing like those of professional philosophers or, for that matter, of any professional academic more generally. Indeed, Nietzsche seemed intent on turning all our preconceived ideas and customs upside down and to stand somehow outside of the system that he so harshly criticized. But his professional path started out very differently.1 Nietzsche boasted an impressive educational background from the distinguished German high school Schulpforta, and his brilliant work as student of Altertumswissenschaft (Classics) at the University of Leipzig earned him a professorship in Classical Philology at the University of Basel at the exceptionally young age of twenty four (he had not even completed his doctoral dissertation!).2 Nietzsche not only had an intimate familiarity with ancient texts and culture,3 but he also came to the field with much promise and many professional connections; therefore, the professorship in Basel promised to be a perfect starting platform for scholarly stardom in the field.4 And yet, already by the time of taking up his position as professor, Nietzsche had started to seriously doubt the direction and value of traditional academic approaches, and appears to have envisioned for himself a role that would bring important change in the way philosophy and classics were pursued.5 The rebellion was official and public in 1872 with the publication of his first monograph, The Birth of Tragedy.

Among his many qualms about the state of classical scholarship,6 Nietzsche had grown particularly critical of the influence of Socrates, both as a historical figure within the context of classical Athens and, subsequently (and perhaps even more dominantly), as a lens through which Nietzsche’s contemporaries tended to view and evaluate the ancient world in toto.7 Socrates had been the widely esteemed hero, even martyr,8 of philosophy and culture ever since the late fourth century BCE, and this position of influence and admiration that followed Socrates’ reception collided head-on with the interpretations of ancient Greek philosophy and culture that the young Nietzsche had started to advance. For Nietzsche, Socrates was the symptom of Greek decline who had played an important role in turning the creative and powerful Greek spirit and artist into a weak, submissive, introverted and irrelevant ‘rationalizer’, later known as the quintessential philosopher. Nietzsche’s book was a scandal that resulted in a severe punishment: his unconventional approach to scholarship and to the profession received devastating evaluation from his peers,9 his classes were mostly abandoned by students, and his standing in the field never recovered. After the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was—according to his earlier collaborator and friend, Hermann Usener—‘dead as a scholar’.10 And yet, the harsh judgement of his peers never deterred Nietzsche from continuing his work and publications. His comments on contemporary scholars were as harsh and biting as ever, he continued to lecture on matters of great importance to him and these topics generally found their way to his subsequent publications (more below). Nietzsche found his readers, though mostly posthumously—future generations have shown great appreciation for his philosophical work and critical acumen. Nietzsche’s impact goes far beyond the philosophical tradition, and one of his most valuable contributions was precisely the fierceness with which he confronted the very tradition of thought that he himself emerged from. In that sense, one might expect that Nietzsche, consistently drawing inspiration from the ancient world,11 had much to say about a group of ancient intellectuals who advocated new approaches to education and society—the sophists.

In particular, given that the sophists have been regarded traditionally as the main intellectual opponents of Plato and the subsequent philosophical tradition, Nietzsche could well have seen the enemy of the enemy, so to speak, as an ally.12 Scholarship on this particular area of ancient thought has turned, more or less, upside down and today, the sophistic movement is seen in many corners as an influential expression of the vibrant cultural, professional, and intellectual experimentation or ‘enlightenment’ of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE,13 manifested in individuals with varied (but often interrelated) interests and contributions to their contemporary culture. As such, the contrast between the recent communis opinio and the traditional views on the sophists (heavily dependent on interpretations of Plato) could hardly be starker, which also leads to increased scholarly expectations for Nietzsche to voice the support of the sophists as much as he criticizes their critics. But evaluating the sophists in their own terms is no easy matter, both then and now, and the scarcity of independent source material gives us (and Nietzsche) little concrete knowledge to work with. As a result, Nietzsche’s approach to the sophists turns out to be multilayered: overt expressions of support that occur in his late published (and much discussed) work may seem—when taken individually—rather mysterious and difficult to connect to his core philosophical ideas; the sustained engagement with sophistic culture that emerges from his early lecture notes onwards (as will be shown), however, indicates a fascination for the sophists that influences many core elements in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Given that the first layer—Nietzsche’s references to the sophists in his late thought—is rather well discussed in scholarship, the main focus of this present contribution is to shed light on the second layer of the argument—Nietzsche’s early thought. The overarching aim of this article is to show that Nietzsche’s explicit (though rare) references to sophists in his late work should be seen as growing out from his long professional engagement with sophists, starting from his earliest lecture notes. In conclusion, I will consider reasons why Nietzsche does not champion the sophists openly, if indeed they have exercised such an important influence on him.

2. Scholarly Opinions on Nietzsche’s Engagement with the Sophists

Before going into more detail about Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists, a few preliminary remarks are due about Nietzsche’s own corpus and about the current scholarly views on the topic. Today, Nietzsche’s works and writings (published and unpublished), up to the most random and disconnected fragment, are collected in several large volumes. Scholars generally distinguish three periods in Nietzsche’s work: the early (1869–1876), middle (1878–1882), and late (1883–1888). His unpublished work is generally treated separately, and is collected in the so-called Nachlass.14 Altogether, we possess a large number of fragments and snippets that give us insight, at least of some kind, into Nietzsche’s intellectual development,15 although this unconventional corpus also comes with particular dangers and dilemmas.16 Are we justified, for example, to pass off ideas and thoughts that Nietzsche himself never published, and hence perhaps never really fully endorsed, as genuinely his own? Some scholars take a hermeneutically more conservative stance and discount unpublished material, others advocate for a hermeneutically more liberal approach to his work and argue that Nietzsche explicitly invites a more nuanced interpretation of his philosophy.17 This issue is particularly pressing for those discussions of Nietzsche’s thought that rest to a large extent on his Nachlass, such as his treatment of ancient sophists that will be the focus of this chapter. Furthermore, some parts of Nietzsche’s philosophical output have had a particularly lively reception outside of academia (e.g., his idea of Übermensch), and here too Nietzsche’s engagement with the sophists, and in particular his supposed intellectual proximity to Thrasymachus and Callicles, is often widely assumed rather than argued for.18 In fact, there is hardly another topic in Nietzsche’s philosophy on which scholarship is so divided, even when evidence used to argue for an opposing position is the same.

Recent debate around Nietzsche’s interest in the sophists is crystallized around two relatively recent scholarly contributions to the topic. Thomas Brobjer takes a ‘hermeneutically conservative’ approach and focuses exclusively on Nietzsche’s published material and reading catalogues, finds the references to the sophists in these places incoherent and writes off Nietzsche’s mysterious references to sophists as a superficial fascination for a recent book that Nietzsche read.19 Brobjer reacts to scholarly work where philosophically meaningful connection with the sophists is rather lightly assumed given the (perceived) intellectual affinity between Nietzsche and sophists, but where we find little explicit material in Nietzsche’s published corpus to support this assumption.20 Even though his caution is in many respects salutary and pushes interpreters out of their comfort zones, his treatment of Nietzsche’s thought appears also out of touch with Nietzsche’s own indications about how to read him.21 The ‘hermeneutically liberal’ approach is far more common among Nietzsche scholars, but for the purposes of the present discussion we may well refer to the contributions of Joel Mann and Getty Lustila, who have taken on Brobjer’s challenge and claim that Nietzsche’s debt to the sophists was profound.22 In order to argue for this position, they work with the Nachlass and, in addition to Nietzsche’s explicit mentions of the sophists, also discuss passages that include implicit suggestions of sophistic influence on Nietzsche’s philosophical development. While I side ultimately with Mann’s approach and hope to demonstrate, by reference to material otherwise not included in discussions on Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists, that the sophists did play an important and continuous role in his philosophy, I also want to take seriously Brobjer’s challenge: why did Nietzsche shy away from discussing the sophists head on?

I hope it has become clear to the reader by now that we are dealing here with a doubly complicated issue: the intellectual movement that we are investigating, the sophists, presents us with a notoriously complicated set of issues (see also the other contributions to this Special Issue and (Barney 2006)), and the particular reception of that movement in Nietzsche introduces another corpus that has created fundamental rifts in scholarly discourse. Not everything can be solved in the present contribution, and hence the following discussion does not pretend to give an exhaustive overview of the issue, but has a far less ambitious goal: to establish the most economical and probable interpretation of Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists, with the understanding that—given the nature of our sources—not all evidence may point towards one clear conclusion.

3. General Outlines of the Sophists in Nietzsche’s Corpus

Nineteenth century scholarship had finally started to warm up to the possibility that the so-called sophists may have positively contributed to the development of fifth century BCE intellectual movements. Nietzsche had access to these developments through the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, George Grote and Eduard Zeller, of whom the latter two were particularly influential for Nietzsche’s approach to the early Greek philosophy and the sophists in particular.23 Hence, it was almost ‘safe’ for Nietzsche to go either way, to either praise or blame the sophists, for there were illustrious advocates on both sides of the interpretative lines. Furthermore, Nietzsche held classes (lectures, seminars) from 1869 onwards on Plato’s dialogues, prose authors, early Greek philosophers (or “Pre-Platonic philosophers”, as he called the seminar), on ancient Greek rhetoric and Aristotle’s Rhetoric,24 which meant that as he was preparing the lectures he must have been intimately familiar both with original texts by sophists and the relevant contemporary scholarship on these topics. We may assume, then, that Nietzsche had a good grasp of the topic and was continuously exposed to what he would have understood as ‘sophistic thought’.

Nietzsche appears to be well aware of the ambivalence about the sophists but, considering all his published and unpublished work together, he does not choose to make sophists into a prominent theme in his work, at least not in a very clear or militant way.25 Instead, Nietzsche appears to be using both the more mainstream interpretation (sophists as a group of pseudo-philosophers as described by, say, Plato) and the more ‘progressive’ approach (sophists as movement that inspires education and philosophy) where appropriate. There is, however, a certain linearity to his approach: his reference to sophists changes and develops over time; therefore, there is more ambivalence in his very early notes and publications on the role of sophists in Greek cultural production, whereas in time his engagement with the sophists becomes more sophisticated and intertwined with his own philosophical interests.

Scholars who judge Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists solely based on the actual publications (‘hermeneutic conservatives’) argue that Nietzsche’s fascination for the sophists occurs exclusively in his very late work, and even then is not really fully grounded in his philosophical views, but remains on the surface and is thus best disgarded.26 The discussion below hopes to challenge this interpretation. While it is true that Nietzsche’s engagement with the sophists can be helpfully divided between two main interpretations in his output that correspond, more or less exactly, to two particular stages in his works, there appears to be strong continuity from the early period to the later period (as will be demonstrated below); therefore the latter cannot be fully appreciated without grasping the former. And even though Nietzsche’s very early notes do suggest that he held at times a more mainstream view of the sophists, already from his earliest lecture notes and fragments onwards, a far more complex and multilayered engagement with the sophists emerges.

In these early notes, lectures and publications (until roughly 1876 [see the division of his periods above]), Nietzsche mentions the role of the sophists in establishing the educational framework in ancient Greece and sees them as drivers of the competitive environment that dominates the core of Greek cultural production.27 Most of this material remains unpublished, though his lectures are delivered repeatedly, suggesting therefore that he was committed to views advocated therein. Nietzsche’s attitude appears different in his final writing period (especially in 1888), where he looks to sophists, and in particular to Thucydides, as the original thinkers of anti-moralism and as realists, free spirits and, so it seems, his own predecessors. Having established the competitive environment that is driven by the sophistic movement (in his early work), Nietzsche now turns his gaze towards the outstanding individuals that emerge from this context. The sophists enable, according to Nietzsche, such figures like Thucydides to take the stage. To fully understand Nietzsche’s appraisal of Thucydides, then, we need to unpack Nietzsche’s complex engagement and fascination for the sophists from his earliest work onwards. In other words, if we consider his corpus more generally, Nietzsche’s references to the sophists—occasional and mysterious as they may appear at first sight—turn out to be far more varied and substantial, and their influence on Nietzsche as intellectual antipodes to Socrates and Plato appear to be greater than appreciated in scholarship thus far. We will look at these two stages and contexts in more detail below.

4. Nietzsche on Sophists in His Early Works

Even though there is surprisingly little direct engagement with sophists in his published works (they are mentioned around ten times across his published works),28 we get some further insight into Nietzsche’s interpretation of sophists from his lectures, notes, and fragments. Nietzsche’s university lectures generally offer a clearer and worked-out set of interpretations, whereas his notes and, in particular, his fragments, require far more interpretative work and are probably best read alongside his published works or lectures (See above and (Stern 2019)). The overall picture that emerges from looking at these three sets of texts together is that despite a few occasional pejorative uses of the term sophists in his very early notes, Nietzsche harbored some (corollary?) interest in the sophists from the 1870s onwards, though they did not play a central role in his interpretation of early Greek philosophy, music, and art.

During his student days at the University of Leipzig,29 Nietzsche published a couple of journal articles indicating that he was working on early Greek poetry (Theognis) and investigating the sources for ancient philosophy (especially Diogenes Laertius). His personal notes from that time also demonstrate that he was already thinking about the role of Socrates and Euripides in the fifth century developments in Greek tragedy and music—themes that he worked out in more detail for his famous first book, The Birth of Tragedy (henceforth BT). In these early notes, Nietzsche occasionally operates with the pejorative term ‘sophistic’ and seems to use it to refer to Socrates or others in a negative way. Sophists and Socrates are associated with what Nietzsche would regard as ‘rationalizing forces’ in Greek thought, and thus set against the Dionysian drives that Nietzsche emphasizes in music and art. In his notes from 1867 to 1869, Nietzsche recurrently counts Socrates among the sophists, and that—it seems—is not meant to be a compliment for Socrates. In fall of 1869, for example, he notes the following: “Socrates and the Greek tragedy. Euripides as critic of his predecessors. Details: Prologue, unity. Euripides the dramatic Socrates. Socrates the fanatic of dialectic. Socrates the destroyer of tragedy. One must agree with Aristophanes: Socrates belonged to the sophists”.30 The familiar theme about Socrates’ impact on Greek tragedy that will become the overarching argument of The Birth of Tragedy is here sketched out in the briefest outline. The conclusion of the whole development of Greek tragedy is to consider Socrates – as a fanatic of dialectic, a never-stopping chatter-box of theories and rationality – as truly belonging to the group of sophists, exactly as diagnosed already by Aristophanes in his comic plays. These are people who do thinking and arguing professionally. A similar understanding of the results of the sophistic movement as something deplorable emerges from a passage from BT (p. 13):

It is in this tone, half indignantly and half contemptuously, that Aristophanic comedy is wont to speak of both of them—to the consternation of modern men, who would indeed be willing enough to give up Euripides, but cannot suppress their amazement that Socrates should appear in Aristophanes as the first and head sophist, as the mirror and epitome of all sophistical tendencies; in connection with which it offers the single consolation of putting Aristophanes himself in the pillory, as a rakish, lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without here defending the profound instincts of Aristophanes against such attacks, I shall now indicate, by means of the sentiments of the time, the close connection between Socrates and Euripides.31

In his work leading up to his new interpretation of Greek tragedy and the role of Socrates and Euripides in its moment of decline, Nietzsche compares the two to sophists and identifies their contributions to tragedy as resulting from sophistic drives that Socrates and Euripides are associated with from antiquity (especially in Aristophanic comedies) onwards. Socrates himself becomes the apotheosis—or maybe even a perversion (as we will later see)?—of the rationalistic drive manifested by the sophistic movement. It seems clear that Nietzsche’s use of the label ‘sophist’ is here intended to convey a pejorative interpretation of their influence and that this aligns with a tradition that regards these thinkers as antipodes to ‘philosophers of truth’ vel sim.

In his lectures, Encyclopedia der klassischen Philologie, from 1871 (repeated in 1873/4), however, Nietzsche gets increasingly more specific. In Section 18 of his lecture notes, in which he discusses the study of ancient philosophy from early Greek philosophers onwards, Nietzsche—perhaps somewhat unexpectedly—defines the sophist in the following way: “Sophists, a new phenomenon: the development of an abstract teaching style that is so close to us moderns that we cannot understand the aversion of Plato and Aristotle. The whole of educated Greece was on their side. Grote deserves credit for having characterized them more accurately. But it becomes deeper only when one understands Socrates, according to Aristophanes, as the epitome of sophistry”32. The sophists are described as teachers at their core, and characterized as a modern phenomenon; in Nietzsche’s interpretation, they are a new development in ancient Greece that Nietzsche’s contemporaries (and we may assume our own) would be able to relate to well. So well, in fact, that if we made an effort to understand the sophists for what they really were, we would not be able to grasp the negative reactions of Plato and Aristotle! This comment is indicative of Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists on their own terms. Already here, he is trying to rid himself from inherited preconceptions and to pave his own way in approaching the material. Nietzsche points here to deeply rooted hypocrisy in the treatment of the sophists: he knows, of course, that most of his contemporary scholarship would have seen things differently and—in the wake of Plato—treated sophists as thinkers whose core mission is fundamentally alien to us. In other words, most of his contemporaries did not find it difficult to understand the negative reactions of Plato and Aristotle. According to Nietzsche, their approach was therefore not only based on their total reliance on Plato’s biased judgement, but also presumably harmful for themselves as they denied the importance and relevance of the sophists, who in many ways are very similar to educators of the modern world.

But there is more: the epitome of all sophists is Socrates, who pushes the sophistic movement to another level altogether: “Science is now becoming aggressive and wants to correct what is already there: the ancients only wanted to know and believed in the aristocracy of knowledge. From now on, competence is considered to be teachable: hence the sectarian system introduced by Socrates, which is breaking away from the ancient association of custom and political instincts”.33 From these and similar comments, the impression one gets is that sophists are in themselves neutral figures but acquire a negative coloring when associated—as they should be, according to Nietzsche—with Socrates. Or put another way, an otherwise innovative sophistic movement that was well received by ancient contemporaries became tainted as soon as Socrates joined their ranks (or was associated with them). This is, of course, a diametrically opposed reading to that suggested by philosophers from antiquity onwards: Socrates is a hero and not a villain! Socrates is the esteemed philosopher and not a sophist! While Plato was determined to distinguish Socrates from the sophists in order to set boundaries for philosophy proper, Nietzsche is eager to distinguish Socrates from the sophists on the grounds that the latter (the sophists) are the true ancient thinkers, and Socrates joining their ranks ultimately destroys the innovative movement. As is well known, highlighting Socrates as the villain in the history of philosophy becomes a major driving thought from this period onwards that appears to take all of Nietzsche’s intellectual energy.

It is perhaps curious that even though some of his early lectures refer to sophists in a negative way, Nietzsche viewed them as legitimate thinkers ever since he was involved in a project on Democritus from 1865 onwards (never completed or published). In his examination of early Greek philosophers in the context of the Democritus project, the sophists are generally regarded as worthwhile thinkers to include as relevant philosophical influences.34 For example, in his notes on the Democritus project, Nietzsche expressed deep concern about the scholarly perception of Democritus and complained that he was neglected in scholarship because he was labeled and treated as a sophist, and not as a fully-fledged philosopher, as he deserved.35 In collecting evidence of Democritus’ philosophical reach, Nietzsche mentions the intellectual contributions of individual “sophists” (Nietzsche’s term), thus suggesting that they are given philosophical importance comparable to other (more canonized) early Greek philosophers. In his comments, Protagoras, Prodicus, and Antiphon are mentioned alongside Democritus, and later also Antisthenes and Stilpo. While the first three make up the canonized group of sophists, the latter names are fully fixed in the philosophical tradition. The implication here is that in order to properly understand early Greek philosophy, it is important to consider the role of the sophists and to take seriously their contribution to the scholarly debates of the time as being potentially philosophical. In other passages, Nietzsche makes it clear that not all of the sophists’ output is philosophically relevant by default. Hippias, for instance, is highlighted as one of the first theorists of language,36 but elsewhere he is said to have had no philosophically relevant output.37 What the criteria are for deciding whether a text is philosophical or non-philosophical is not thematized, though it seems that Nietzsche followed here a rather conventional treatment of the subject and did not suggest that his position stood out as extraordinary.

Outside of the Democritus project and somewhat later, from the 1870s onwards, Nietzsche’s notes exhibit his increasing interest in the educational structures in ancient Greece more broadly. There seems to have been a development in Nietzsche’s thought from comparisons made between Socrates and the sophists, both viewed pejoratively as ‘rationalizing’ forces of Greek tragedy, to the political figure of the educator, and here sophists are mentioned next to Plato, but they also become something else altogether.

One of the clearest, or perhaps most targeted, discussions of the sophists in this period can be found in his lectures ‘History of Greek Eloquence’ (Geschichte der griechischen Beredsamkeit) from Winter semester 1871/2.38 Nietzsche’s perspective here is perhaps somewhat one-sided, for his focus is strictly on eloquence; therefore, sophists, who are otherwise understood to have been active in a variety of areas, are drawn into the discussion specifically from the angle of rhetoric:

The actual sophists, the higher teachers from Greece proper and the eastern colonies, gave a far more comprehensive teaching; teaching speech was only a part of their activity. Sophistry arose with Protagoras’s campaign through the Hellenic cities, which began around 455. He had an influence on Attic eloquence much earlier than the Sicilians. He promised to teach τὸν ἥττω λόγον κρείττω ποιεῖν: how one could help the weaker cause to win through dialectics. This dialectic was supposed to make all other arts and sciences unnecessary: how one could argue the geometer without being a geometer: for example, about natural philosophy, wrestling, and practical political life. The students had to learn sample pieces by heart. The other great sophists are also worth considering. Despite the tasks of dialectics that were set in this way, the great sophists were concentrating powers of the highest order, through which the various kinds of knowledge were bound together and a higher level of education was achieved. A practical result of the new education after the middle of the fifth century: the great Pericles: he debated a lot with Protagoras.39

Some of the elements mentioned here recur in other passages too: in Nietzsche’s interpretation, sophists ought to be seen as the higher teachers from Greece and its eastern colonies, whereas teaching how to speak effectively was only one aspect of their activity. Furthermore, the sophists brought the Greek education to a new and higher level, which, as a consequence, enabled intellectual engagement at a far higher level between people with different interests and abilities.40 All specialized knowledge (geometry, wrestling, etc.) proved unnecessary without the ability to engage in agonistic dialectic. Pericles was treated as a product of this new education and Nietzsche argued that his interaction with Protagoras and the sophists enabled Pericles’ intellectual engagement with the philosopher Anaxagoras.41 Protagoras takes an important role in Nietzsche’s evaluation of sophists and it is probably not a coincidence that Protagoras is also one of the sophists about whose philosophical contributions we are best informed. Hence, the character Protagoras has more potential than most other sophists to become interesting for Nietzsche as a philosophical individual, rather than simply a name in a larger anonymous group.42

In his lecture course ‘Representation of Ancient Rhetoric’ (Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik) from the summer semester of 1874, Nietzsche sets out the course by elaborating on the notion of rhetoric and the particularly Greek origins of the phenomenon: “Rhetoric arises from a people who still live in mythical images and do not yet know the absolute need for historical fidelity: they prefer to be persuaded rather than instructed, and even the human need for judicial eloquence should be developed into a free art. […] The education of ancient man usually culminated in rhetoric: it was the highest intellectual activity of the educated political man—a very strange idea for us! […] This characterizes the specific nature of Hellenic life: to regard all matters of the mind, the seriousness of life, the need, even danger as play”.43 Sophists are frequently referred to in these lectures as rhetoricians, and the distinction between the categories is blurry, though this did not seem to bother Nietzsche too much. The emphasis was on the creative elements of rhetoric and on vindicating the discipline as something not only important (also for his contemporaries), but also as something that truly gives us insight into the Greeks and their productive/artistic way of life.

In his lecture notes on rhetoric, Nietzsche appears generally committed to giving the students a synoptic view of the fields, and he therefore discussed most of the sophists and rhetoricians from the very beginnings of Greek rhetoric until the late Roman era.44 Depending on the particular focus of the course, the main focus of his analysis was either on the philosophy of language and stylistic idiosyncrasies of the individual sophists/rhetoricians, and this surely reflected, at least to some extent, the interests in language of the young Nietzsche.45 With the sophists’ gradual advancement of, and emphasis on, the importance of rhetoric, and with their explicit sensitivity toward the use of language, it comes as no surprise that the sophists were described in the lecture notes in a positive light and their rhetorical and stylistic innovations that would underscore the artistry of speech were greeted with pleasure by Nietzsche.

Furthermore, Nietzsche claimed that Greeks became increasingly fascinated by speech and language, and that this could be taken as the result of the practices of the two sophistic branches outlined above: the political, endorsed by Protagoras, and the artistic, introduced by Gorgias. The latter’s innovation resulted in emphasizing pleasure and enjoyment one can take when using speech artfully, having no special regard for the content. This attitude was seen by Nietzsche as characteristic to the nation of artists (Künstlervolk), who want, at last, “to achieve something good” with their own joy for fine speech:

The innovation began with Gorgias; he came solemnly, magnificently adorned […] with a world-wide reputation and brought the epideictic speech: with it [i.e., epideictic speech] one wants to show what one can do, one does not want to deceive, the factual content is not taken into account. The pleasure in beautiful speech gains a realm for itself where it does not intersect with need. It is a breath of fresh air for the artistic people, they want to prove themselves something really good with speech. Now the philosophers have had no sense of this (they understand nothing at all about the art that lives and moves around them, nor about sculpture), and so there is an unnecessarily violent hostility [against rhetoric].46 (KGA, p. 471)

Nietzsche’s description of the origins of Gorgianic rhetoric as art sets out his particular interpretation of the relationship between the art of speech and philosophy. In Nietzsche’s estimation, philosophers do not have a sense for art, even though they are surrounded by art of all kinds, and this results in an unnecessarily hostile environment between the admirers of fine speech, on one hand, and of philosophy, on the other.47 It seems natural to assume that Nietzsche’s criticism of philosophy and philosophical schools as insensitive towards aesthetics and art goes back to this description. In other words, Nietzsche’s lectures on rhetoricians and sophists bring home for him the significant contributions of the sophists in developing the very tool of thought, language, into an art. His criticisms of scholars and philosophers for their insensitivity to language in their own works are pervasive throughout his writings. And, perhaps most importantly, Nietzsche’s own published writing clearly aims to transcend the standard language of science that he witnessed around him, and to do philosophy and thinking differently, in an artful way that was not known before. Even though Nietzsche never makes this connection fully explicit, his observations about the sophists and their importance in furthering language as an artform make it hard to deny that the sophists and, in particular, Nietzsche’s own interpretation of the sophists as artists of language, were inspirational for developing Nietzsche’s characteristic style of writing.

With regard to the Protagorean branch of rhetoric, Nietzsche noticed that language and speech were growing increasingly momentous because of the rise of democracy in Athens, and they acquired a strong importance by becoming gradually part and parcel of the means of power among equals.48 That is, the ability to speak in public was rewarded by democratic institutions and became the excellent tool to exercise power by persuading the mass audience.49 It was important to have at least the (illusory) view of equality in democratic Athens in order to sustain the antagonistic atmosphere, where every citizen could theoretically have the chance to compete with another, with nobody’s ‘truth’ being superior or standpoint more authoritative (per se).50

In the aphorisms collected in We Philologists (KSA 8, 11-127),51 Nietzsche dedicated substantial attention to discussing the agonistic framework of Greek culture.52 In particular, Nietzsche touched on the issue of polis and the constructive power of competition. He contended that polis and striving to be the best (αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν) “grew out of mutual and deadly enmity”.53 Importantly, the existence of the polis was crucial for the purposes of culture and thus for the emergence of the highest individual. And yet, although Nietzsche seemed to imply that competition and strife are the characteristics of the enormous political instinct of the Greeks,54 this intellectual culture is described as deviant.55 In consequence, culture was seen simply as a side-effect of this pervasive agonistic atmosphere that realized itself mostly in political sphere. Nietzsche was particularly interested in what he took to have been the goal and ambition of the polis—bringing up (even breeding) individuals of the highest order: “I am only interested in the relationship between the people and the upbringing of the individual; and there are certainly some things among the Greeks that are very favorable to the development of the individual, yet not due to the goodness of the people, but rather due to the struggle of evil impulses. Through fortunate inventions, one can bring up the great individual in a completely different and more highly developed way than he has been done until now by chance. That is where my hopes lie: the breeding of great men” (NF 1875, 5.11). Moreover, it was not only individuals that were entering this agonistic atmosphere in Athens, but also different or even opposing disciplines (rhetoric, sophistic, philosophy, politics), each with different world views, that were struggling to survive and prevail.

Possibly having the sophists in mind, Nietzsche argued that “[t]he polis <was> completely opposed to new education”.56 This can be explained by understanding the state (polis) as an institution that relies on fixed rules founded upon conventions. That kind of apparatus is principally opposed to anything new and tries to fight change, such as the emergence of the new education provided by the sophists. Furthermore, one might also think that due to the aristocratic foundation of the Athenian culture (Jaeger 1939, p. 2), its citizens received the sophists who were boasting to be able to teach anyone, in a hostile way. Teachers of this new education were seen as a threat to the stability of the established political system and were therefore opposed by elites. Yet, since competition and strife were in Nietzsche’s view the bloodline of ancient Greeks, the sophists were actually well received by the average Greek, with the result that the sophistic mindset was gradually absorbed into the workings of the polis.57

Nietzsche emphasized the aspect of competition and envy (Neid) in another essay from the same period, Homer’s Contest.58 There, the Greeks are characterized as envious, though this feature is found to be the impact of a beneficent god rather than deemed a deplorable flaw (KSA, p. 787). Competition is regarded by Nietzsche in a positive light because it spurs people to become better, to overcome themselves and to be creative.59 The sophists are regarded by Nietzsche as an essential part of this agonistic culture—they are the “higher teachers of antiquity” who encourage competition and inspire ‘individuals’ to strive towards being the best: “But just as the young men being educated were brought up in competition with one another, so their educators, in turn, were in competition with one another. The great musical masters, Pindar and Simonides, stood side by side, suspicious and jealous; the sophist, the higher teacher of antiquity, met another sophist in competition”.60 From this period, we also have one of Nietzsche’s most valuable philological contributions—a re-evaluation of the Contest of Homer and Hesiod that Nietzsche traced back, controversially at the time, to the famous fourth century sophist and student of Gorgias, Alcidamas. Nietzsche’s intuition about the authorship was later confirmed by a papyrus find and his assessment of that work has received a lot of excellent treatment in recent scholarship that will not be rehearsed here.61 For the purposes of the current discussion, it is worthwhile to point out how deeply Nietzsche was engaged with the rhetorical-sophistical tradition, and how accurate his philological insights appear to have been. He knew the fifth and fourth century rhetorical and sophistical atmosphere so well as to be able to recognize that a sophistical text, which was generally assumed to have had a significantly later origin, naturally belongs to this context.

By the time Nietzsche held his course on the “Introduction to Greek Literature” (1874/5) and discussed the development of a ‘reading public’ or audience (‘Lesepublikum’), he appears to have associated the rise of this phenomenon of a reading public with the figure of the sophist: “Only after education-aristocracy [Bildungs-Aristokratie] was established everywhere by the wandering sophists, after a city had become the central seat of education, its language the universal Hellenic education-dialect [Bildungs-Dialekt], did a widespread reading public emerge, which then also produced the true literary figures [Litteraten]”.62 Hence, it appears from the above that towards the end of his ‘early period’, Nietzsche came to regard the sophists as gravitational force paving the way for a new literary culture, one that created its own literary elite, gathered educational practices around cities, and started to value a particular kind of literary expression: the so-called Hellenic education-dialect. Sophists were seen as essential in crossing from the archaic period to the new one, and the sophist became an important interpreter (in Nietzsche’s words, ‘the sophistical interpreter, philologist’) of previous literary efforts and thus offered itself as a connection between the two periods and their opposing drives.63

In this same lecture course, Nietzsche went even further and argued that all subsequent literary genres were possible because of the sophists and their educational efforts: “The development of the Socratic dialogue is dependent on the influence of the masters of oratory and on sophists; one could not learn to write anywhere else and when once compelled to write, they had to meet high demands: Socrates preferred not to write, evidently because he had not learned it. Aeschines and Antisthenes, the two masters of the Socratic dialogue, depend on Gorgias, Xenophon on Prodicus”.64 The case of Socrates is here of course curious. According to Nietzsche, Socrates did not write philosophy because he did not know how to write; he was already too old to be taught by the sophists, teachers of Greek prose. Nietzsche did of course not mean that Socrates was illiterate and was not able to write in the basic sense of the term, but rather that he did not have access to educated prose writing that would have enabled him to write that level of prose that was required for philosophical works (the early Greek philosophy tradition had thus far been highly developed but mainly poetic). This interpretation of Socrates’ literary silence is, as far as I am aware, original and not discussed in philosophical communities that are generally dependent on Plato, whose dialogues connect Socrates’ refusal to write down his philosophy with his denial of being able to teach.65 But this section also suggests, more generally, that in Nietzsche’s account of the development of Greek literature and prose writing the entire philosophical discourse in prose (i.e., after the so-called Pre-Socratics) emerged as a direct result of the activity of the sophists! In other words, the sophists not only taught the art of language, as was suggested in Nietzsche’s earlier lecture notes, but they essentially established the entire discourse of philosophical prose writing.

The ‘age of the sophists’ gave rise to a particularly influential prose artist, historian, sophist, and thinker—an author whose works and thought summed up all the different strands of sophistic movement and who was particularly inspirational for Nietzsche—Thucydides.66 Even though Nietzsche had taught lectures and seminars on Thucydides in Basel since 1871 (Janz 1974), this Greek author becomes increasingly important for Nietzsche in his later period when he casts Thucydides as the prime example, indeed a culmination, of the sophistic drives and movement. In scholarship, Thucydides is often discussed in connection with some sophistic trends, but he is rarely ever counted among the fifth-fourth century BCE canon of sophists. Thucydides provides a connecting link between Nietzsche’s early interest in the sophists and the late manifestation of that interest through the figure of Thucydides. In other words, the sophists play an important role as a group of intellectuals who motivate a successful movement, but Thucydides is the supreme example and prime representative that this movement produced, and one that Nietzsche was particularly interested in.

5. Nietzsche on the Sophists in His Later Works

The middle period in Nietzsche’s work yields no explicit discussion or references to the sophists, even though some scholars have attempted to trace sophistic ideas (and in particular the Protagorean homo mensura argument) in his work from the middle period as well.67 While the results of these investigations remain hypothetical and difficult to prove conclusively, it is generally agreed that the final period of Nietzsche’s work stands out by his strong interest in the sophists. References to sophists are even then, admittedly, infrequent, but they nevertheless clearly point to Nietzsche’s appreciation for them. Often, references to sophists are intertwined with increasing praise of Thucydides, who comes to be regarded as the blossoming flower of the Greek instinct and sophistic culture. Could it be that Nietzsche’s references to the sophists have little to do with his own philosophical agenda, and are merely due to his reading of Victor Brochard’s treatment of ancient skepticism in his Les sceptiques grecs that was published in 1887?68 It is hard to tell exactly what kind of impact this book eventually had on Nietzsche, but it seems far more economical to argue, based on the preceding efforts to demonstrate Nietzsche’s engagement with the sophists from the earliest lectures and writings onwards, that Brochard’s discussion of the sophists may have been influential for Nietzsche because there was already fertile ground for appreciating their contribution to Hellenic culture. Since the later period in Nietzsche’s thought and its relationship to sophists is relatively well discussed in scholarship,69 I will limit the treatment below to giving an overview of the main discussion points, and to connecting the late work with the themes and ideas that emerged from the early writings.

Let us start with a passage that counts probably as one of the most widely known statements about sophists in his corpus, a section ‘What I Owe the Ancients’ (Section 2) from Twilight of the Idols:

My respite, my preference, my cure for all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, the principe of Machiavell are most closely related to me in their unconditional will to deceive oneself and to see reason in reality—not in “reason”, even less in “morality”. Nothing cures the Greeks’ miserable whitewashing of ideals, which the “classically educated” youth carries into life as a reward for his gymnasium training, as thoroughly as Thucydides. One must turn him over line by line and read his ulterior motives as clearly as his words: there are few thinkers so rich in ulterior motives. In him, the culture of the Sophists, that is to say, the culture of the Realists, finds its perfect expression: this invaluable movement amidst the moral and idealistic swindle of the Socratic schools that is breaking out everywhere. Greek philosophy as the decadence of Greek instinct; Thucydides as the great sum, the final revelation of that strong, strict, hard factuality that lay in the instinct of the older Hellenes.70

A later note from his unpublished writings suggests that this assessment of Greek culture was not merely offered in passing but had a more permanent resonance for Nietzsche. Since this amounts to one of the most sustained explanations of sophists and their importance for Nietzsche, I will give the quotation from the fragments here in full:

The moment is very remarkable: the Sophists touch upon the first critique of morality, the first insight into morality...

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they place the majority (the local conditioning) of moral value judgments side by side—they make it clear that every morality can be dialectically justified,—that it makes no difference: [i] that is, they divine how every justification of a morality must necessarily be sophistic -

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a proposition that was subsequently proven in the grandest style by the ancient philosophers from Plato onwards (to Kant).

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they present the first truth that “a morality in itself”, a “good in itself”, does not exist, that it is fraudulent to speak of “truth” in this area

Where was the intellectual integrity back then?

The Greek culture of the Sophists grew out of all Greek instincts:

[ii] It belongs to the culture of the Periclean age, just as necessarily as Plato does not belong to it: it has its predecessors in Heraclitus, in Democritus, in the scientific types of ancient philosophy; it finds its expression in the high culture of Thucydides, for example.

[iii] And, finally, it was proven right: every advance in epistemological and moralistic knowledge has restored the Sophists...

[iv] Our contemporary way of thinking is, to a high degree, Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean... It was enough to say that it was Protagorean because Protagoras combined the two parts of Heraclitus and Democritus into himself.71

There are several interesting elements in these two quotations worth pointing out. First, as already mentioned before, Thucydides emerges as a major philosophical inspiration for Nietzsche. Indeed, it is explicitly not philosophers and the philosophical mainstream tradition that galvanizes Nietzsche’s thought. Greek philosophical schools (especially from Socrates onwards) are the decadents who suppress life and instinct by placing morality at the center of their philosophical projects and thus curb human potential. Thucydides, on the other hand, is promoted as the cure to those trends. His writing is tense and packed, his analysis of human nature accurate, fearless and untainted by moralistic goals. Throughout Nietzsche’s whole corpus, there is not even a single critical remark about Thucydides! But most importantly for our purposes here, Thucydides does not emerge from a vacuum—he is a product of sophistic culture. This is the same kind of agonistic environment that Nietzsche had described in his earlier lecture notes, one that is ruthless in cultivating an outstanding individual. And it is important for Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise that such an individual is cultivated, that it can even be reproduced through breeding, rather than emerging as a lone genius from nowhere. And sophists offer such an essential context for understanding the genius of Thucydides.72

Thucydides is declared a model (Vorbild) for Nietzsche already in Daybreak (168), published in 1881. In a rich passage that I will quote in full below, we witness the importance of Thucydides for Nietzsche as well as the connection between Thucydides and the sophistic movement:

A role model.—What do I love about Thucydides, what makes me honor him more than Plato? He takes the most comprehensive and unbiased delight in everything typical of people and events and finds that every type contains a quantum of good reason: this is what he seeks to discover. He has greater practical justice than Plato; he is no slanderer or belittler of those he dislikes or who have hurt him in life. On the contrary: he sees something great in all things and people and adds to them, seeing only types; what would all posterity, to whom he dedicates his work, have to do with what is not typical! Thus, in him, the human thinker, comes that culture of the most unbiased knowledge of the world to a final, glorious flowering, which had its poet in Sophocles, its statesman in Pericles, its physician in Hippocrates, and its naturalist in Democritus: that culture which deserves to be baptized in the name of its teachers, the Sophists, and which, unfortunately, from this moment of baptism onward, suddenly begins to become pale and incomprehensible to us—for now we suspect that it must have been a very immoral culture against which Plato, along with all the Socratic schools, fought! The truth here is so convoluted and entangled that it is repugnant to unravel it: so let the old error (error veritate simplicior) run its old course!73

Several things that emerge from this quotation—the superiority of Thucydides over Plato, characterization of the Greek culture as emerging from the sophists—are familiar from other fragments and sections from his published work. The ending, however, is curious and obscure. What does it mean that ‘truth here is so convoluted and entangled that it is repugnant to unravel it: so let the old error (error veritate simplicior) run its old course’? This brings us to the last question that this essay needs to address: if Nietzsche was indeed as influenced and inspired by the sophists as this essay has tried to demonstrate, why does he not make his attitude to the sophists more explicit, why does he not address this question head on?

A reasonable explanation has been offered by Joel Mann: since we lack first-hand evidence on most of the sophists (especially those from the so-called first generation sophists of the fifth century BCE),74 and most of their contributions are reflected and criticized by their opponents, it is difficult to fully vindicate their role and actual importance (Mann 2003, pp. 409–11). Nietzsche, as a philologist as well as a philosopher, makes use of what he reasonably can, but a detailed treatment of sophists—something similar to his approach to Thucydides or Plato—remains out of reach. Therefore, the old mistake of ultimately allowing Plato to prevail in his assessment of sophists, due to our lack of evidence otherwise, must ‘run its course’. There may also be another dimension to Nietzsche’s laissez-faire attitude that is worth mentioning here, namely his assessment of modern culture as a thoroughly Socratic culture that is basically difficult, if not impossible, to undo. Moderns are essentially so corrupted by morality, in Nietzsche’s view, that we cannot help but misunderstand and simply the sophists.75 Hence, Nietzsche will not offer an explicit and detailed vindication of the sophists, but his deeper philosophical instincts are influenced and set to motion by his closer engagement with the sophistic movement, even if many of the encounters are enabled by their adversaries.

In his early lecture notes, Nietzsche showed appreciation for the individual input of various sophists as far as possible (e.g., the Gorgianic and Protagorean branches), and he was exceptionally well read in the fifth and fourth century intellectual culture, which gave him a good sense of the differences between the philosophical views of the individual sophists. Indeed, at that time, Nietzsche was engaged in close reading of the sophists as part of his lectures, seminars and publications (e.g., on Alcidamas’ Certamen), and being confronted with their individual differences made it somewhat more complicated to discuss the sophists as a homogenous group. In his later work, however, Nietzsche identified Thucydides as the prime sophist, an example whose works are readily available for inspection and discussion, and who emerges as the result of sophistic culture in the broadest sense. I wonder whether being remote from the academic environment that grounded him in close readings of actual Greek materials (he gave up the professorship in 1879, though he last taught at Basel in 1876) rendered Nietzsche in some sense more free to assume a group identity for the sophists and to use this group for his own interpretative purposes. It is important to point out, however, that most of the characteristics that he associates with the sophists are still in keeping with the views (either individuals or the group) that we can trace from his earliest notes onwards.

To conclude, the sophists offered for Nietzsche a brief moment of historical resemblance to his own project, and this may have turned out to be a kind of psychological support and confirmation found in the early Greek intellectual thought that Nietzsche valued highly. It is probably also not irrelevant that the lack of preserved ancient source material on the sophists enabled Nietzsche to use his own creative powers of interpretation in a way that was impossible with regard to other authors. But most importantly, his long and groundbreaking fight against (Plato’s) Socrates and of philosophy grounded in morality had a precedent in the sophists, who were the first to demonstrate that things could be different from the way they have turned out.76 And this insight was probably the most influential lesson Nietzsche learned from the sophists.