The Panacea of Knowledge 149should not exceed a certain limit. A worker needs to feel tolerably well
"so that he and his descendants also work well for our descendants"
(2,682; HHW WS §286).
Nietzsche's portrait of Socrates, who comes off sounding almost like
an ancient social democrat, did not come close to solving his problem
with his philosophical forebear. He was not finished with Socrates, and
he would never be quite finished with him. Nietzsche's declaration that
he was "always fighting a batde with him" (8,97) applies even to writings
as early as The Birth of Tragedy, which he originally intended to conclude
with a reflection on the merits of Socrates, in the fifteenth chapter. Ten
additional chapters were added, dedicated in large part to Wagner's
renewal of Dionysian tragedy. These chapters were harshly critical of
Socrates. In the fifteenth chapter, however, the end of the original ver-
sion, Nietzsche used conciliatory language. He there indicated that in a
certain sense we can also feel gratitude toward Socrates. Socrates is a
"turning point and vortex" (1,100; BT% 15) of world history because he
associated destructive energies with the pleasure of knowledge. The
astonishingly high "pyramid of knowledge in our era" is also a dam
against the danger of human self-annihilation. Nietzsche invited us to
imagine what might have happened had the sum total of power been
applied not "in the service of knowledge" but to "practical, i.e., egoistic
ends of individuals and nations.... The instinctive lust for life would
have been so weakened by universal wars of annihilation and perpetual
migrations of peoples that suicide would have become a matter of
course, and individuals, in a final remnant of a sense of duty, might have
become like the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, where sons strangle their
parents and friends strangle their friends" (1,100). Socratic pleasure in
knowledge had achieved nothing short of averting the "stench of prac-
tical pessimism, which could have generated a gruesome ethic of geno-
cide based on pity" (1,100).
When Nietzsche exhorted himself, in his notebooks of 1875 and in
later writings, not to be "unfair to knowledge" (8,47), he was giving
Socrates a more charitable assessment, since Socrates represents theo-