NIETZSCHE AND SOCRATES IN
M'ESSINA
705
mystic, the symbol of decadent rationalism. He forgot that the Socratic
comedy was not merely a dialectic, an intellectual skepticism and
dissembling; it was also a daemonic affirmation with its own "signs."
The Socratic mystery was finally the mystery of all high comedy–
the truth, or intimations of truth, issuing from mockery. But in the
Socratic comedy the mocker was disciplined along with his victims;
not disciplined by
his
victim but by the severities of his own intima–
tions and discoveries. The triumph of Socrates was continually the
triumph of the humble. Socrates,
agonistes,
evoking a pathos all his
own, was an offertory to the hard-mindedness and imperception of
Athens. Yet the conquest was to Socrates, not to Athens. Here the
comic irony was like that in the Old Norse epics when the fool made
good his boast. It was a double irony: the scapegoat prevailed, but
the skepticism of the fool, which was actually a revelation through
simplicity and a touchstone of the truth, brought its own sense of
humiliation along with its sense of mastery and vision. Therefore the
outcome of this comedy was ambiguous-from abasement, ascen–
dancy.
The
Phaedrus
is a high Socratic comedy. Veiling
his
head in
uncertain reverence before the gods, Socrates the dissembler stands
on the hank of the Ilissus and disburdens himself of
his
profane
dithyramb against the irrational and beastly power of love (more
inspired than the profanity of Benedick himself). Immediately a
piety "sufficient for his needs" gives him a sign that he must recant,
and he absolves his mockery by a palinode, an obscure myth of
the soul in which more is to be understood than is spoken. Then
he closes with a prayer that the gods give him beauty in the inward
life. The scoffer is chastened. The performance in the
Crito
is the
same. Socrates, who has spent his days ridiculing the unexamined
premises of the Philistines, refuses to flee the scandalous wrath of the
Athenians and abides the drinking of the hemlock because he hears
within him, like the sound of a flute in the ears of a votary, the in–
timations of justice. But the face of the condemned Socrates is the
face of the comic imp, with the thin smile and the devoted malice
that made him appear, to the dissolute Alcibiades, like Marsyas the
satyr. This clown with the features of Silenus transvalued the Greek
sophistries by
his
dialectic, by
his
humilities and unexpressed com–
mitments.
