Wreckoning

 there is a fundamental disconnect between men like Alcibiades and Leonardo da Vinci and their own times--they are not men determined by their own time, they represent or embody something older and stronger that is in some sense “out of place” in its own time and can therefore overcome an age of decadence. While this same age of decadence is in an indirect way the “cause” or the opportunity both for the emergence of Alcibiades and of his weaker and decadent contemporaries, Alcibiades is not determined by these or by their horizon in his life or action, let alone in his thought: “Great men are necessary, the age in which they appear is accidental; that they almost always become masters over their age is only because they are stronger, because they are older, because for a longer time much was gathered for them. The relationship between a genius and his age is like that between strong and weak, or between old and young: the age is relatively always much younger, thinner, more immature, less assured, more childish.”

Nietzsche discusses Alcibiades, Caesar, da Vinci, he mentions that these are exceptions, while the rule is:

The man from an age of dissolution, which mixes the races all together, such a man has an inheritance of a multiple ancestry in his body, that is, conflicting and frequently not merely conflicting drives and standards of value, which war among themselves and rarely give each other rest--such a man of late culture and broken lights will typically be a weaker man. His most basic demand is that the war which constitutes him should finally end. Happiness seems to him, in accordance with a calming medicine and way of thinking – for example, Epicurean or Christian – principally as the happiness of resting, of having no interruptions, of surfeit, of the final unity, as the “Sabbath of Sabbaths,” to use the words of the saintly rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a man.

the “raw material” for philosophy is furnished by the aristocratic regime in a much more direct and literal way, in that only the impressive specimens bred over generations by such a regime can become philosophers in the beginnings of philosophy, or receive philosophy at its beginnings. This point is made in a somewhat limited way, but for our purposes, most clearly, when Nietzsche discusses the incredible work that had to go into cultivating physical beauty in Athens--itself originally just the consequence of a physical culture geared toward athletics and thus at bottom toward warfare. The physical beauty that impressed thinkers and philosophers, and that in particular was the fertile ground and inspiration for Platonic philosophy, was one of the end-products of the breeding program inherent in the aristocratic regime.

a) Aristocratic physical culture as precondition of philosophical life.

Critias - Socrates’ criminal, tyrannical, and mad student, is said to have written an abstraction or radicalization of the Spartan constitution, which he understood to have as its purpose the breeding of a “physically supreme specimen.” The Spartan regime is perhaps enough to produce this intended result

The ultimate origin of this identity is in what Nietzsche calls high culture, and which might be understood literally as the cultivation of human nature, a cultivation that is by necessity of long duration, strict, and difficult; a cultivation that might also go by the name of “regime.”

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Nietzsche goes so far as to compare Schopenhauer to Napoleon, another “classical man” who appeared, as he says, as an untimely and unexpected comet or meteor, totally out of place in an age of modern men and mediocrity.

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 the connection hinted at between Schopenhauer as the revival of classical philosophy and Napoleon as the revival of the classical statesman or tyrant, gives a clue about what Nietzsche understands to be the ground or prerequisite of both high culture and philosophy. That is, one must look past the rhetoric of assertion, manliness, Napoleonic greatness, and try to tunnel into Nietzsche’s statements to understand the riddle

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“the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest” is the problem of psychology of the “improvers” of mankind.

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Political truth means that it must have truth for the layman or for “the many,” or for the politically significant part of the regime. Politically effective truth is not the same as truth as such. Each has a sphere and dignity of its own.

In Plato we have both the salvation of philosophy from persecution and its “concealment” under a political mask, its coming forth into the world under the mask of the moralist and the “priest,” under the mask of the “good man.”

Hippias’ rhetoric only aims to please and therefore has to cater to the pleasures of others. Hippias is a man who knows nothing of what is beautiful by nature, but instead slavishly memorizes names to please others with old wives’ tales. He thinks he rules, but he is really being used as a clown.

a) Restatement of the Rhetorical Aims of the Gorgias; the Inconsistency Between the View Presented on Rhetoric in the Gorgias and that in Other Dialogues.

Philosophers must defend the virtues of the many-- chiefly, self-restraint, sophrosune, and justice--if they are to rule, and if they are to have anything to rule at all.

not only do Socrates and Callicles agree fundamentally on the “problem”--the salvation of the erromenesteros and thereby of phusis from convention--but even on the ultimate solution, which is “to rule in the city.” It is only that Plato is much wilier about how to achieve this and that, in fully understanding the requirements of rule and therefore of legislation in the highest degree, he realizes Callicles’ aristocratic radicalism must be spiritualized; and similarly the form of rhetorical warfare for which Callicles is eager must be spiritualized, or intellectualized.

The preservation of the “superior breed” or biological specimen is the preservation of nature in the world and therefore the guarantee of the emergence of truth about the world. 

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“it didn’t work; it leads to men like Socrates being killed; it leads to the extinction of breeding and therefore of the knowledge of nature in the world; for nature and truth to preserve and manifest themselves the ‘philosophers,’ or rather the erromenesteroi, the men of ‘sufficient nature’ from whom the philosopher would under ideal circumstances organically emerge, must take power in the cities and grasp for a tyranny.” It is the “spiritual tyranny” of pre-Socratic philosophy become politically active under emergency conditions of persecution and turned into the pursuit of actual tyranny.