The Panacea of Knowledge 143changed relationship to Socrates, let us examine his portrayal of him in
The Birth of Tragedy.
In The Birth of Tragedy; Socrates was depicted as a man who expected
the most from knowledge. He not only considered it possible to live
with truth but held that a life devoid of truth was not worth living. For
Nietzsche, Socrates was the progenitor of the Western tradition of
knowledge and the will to truth. This Socrates embodied a principle of
knowledge and truth that was directed against tragedy, because it
claimed "not only to know being but even to correct it" (1,99; BT§ 15). If
being can be corrected, pain, fear, suffering, and injustice no longer have
to be tolerated. They can be eliminated, perhaps even instantaneously.
Knowledge produces composure and happiness. For Socrates, correct-
ing existence meant transforming one's own being and in the process
shedding so much light on the nature of the world that life can be led
free of fear and full of trust in existence. Nietzsche's Socrates was a
genius of a science based on the "belief that nature can be explicated
and that knowledge is a panacea" (1,111; BT§ 17). We need not specu-
late as to how the historical Socrates would have viewed this spirit of sci-
ence; our focus here is on how Nietzsche used Socrates to exemplify a
particular stance.
"The belief that nature can be explicated" implies that nature is
essentially cast from the same mold as the human mind. It is intelligible;
or, as Plato would have it, like recognizes like. The corporal senses
respond to the corporeal aspect of the world, and the mind reveals the
ideas that form the perpetual models of the world. In the moment of
insight, human beings connect to their true essence and become what
they already are. They arrive home. This emphatic notion of insight is
predicated on consonance between perceptions and the world. For
Plaro, all of this takes place in a world of thought, not as an empirical
expropriation of the world, which would soon follow.
According to Plato's Socrates, the idea that "knowledge is a panacea"
is borne out at the time of one's death. The narrative of the death of
Socrates is a fundamental document of Platonism. The knowledgeable