The Nietzsche's Socrates: a analysis about The birth of tragedy

Author(s)

Wander Andrade de Paula

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2009-10-06

Examining board members

Oswaldo Giacoia Junior; Iracema Maria de Macedo Gonçalves da Silva; Simone Cristina Mendonça de Souza

• Advisor: Oswaldo Giacoia Junior

Abstract

The research aims to show the several faces of Socrates at Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. We will analyze, for this aim, the Nietzsche's interpretation of the death of the tragedy by the effect of the combined action of Socrates and Euripides and, mainly, what are the outcomes generated for this destruction, which don't comprehend only the scope of art. We also will analyze how the art was produced instinctively by the ancient Greeks and how it passed to be produced consciously by Euripides, so as to reverse the relationship which the ancient Greeks kept with the tragedy. We will reconstitute the analyses of Nietzsche about the opposition between tragic pessimism and theoretical optimism, about the function of the art like transfiguration and overcoming of the pessimism, like that about the relationship between Socratic optimism and modernity. Considering that Nietzsche doesn't treat just of the figure of a crusader Socrates of the science, we will analyze the possibility of another facet of the Nietzsche's interpretation about the socratism, besides the implications generated from it at the relationship established by Nietzsche between art and science. We will still pay attention to the originality of the Nietzsche's analysis of the classic Greece, and his opposition to academic philology of his period. (AU)