ABLE: Nietzsche just didn't get it, according to Stern, when he looked at Socrates.
BAKER: Nietzsche accused Socrates of a philosophical blunder. This error, Nietzsche thought, took western civilization in the wrong direction for 2500 years. Socrates, at the pinnacle of Greek philosophy, Nietzsche said, filled the western consciousness with the idea of an absolutist good, a good independent of and "over" humans as such. The Platonic notion of an unchanging form or idea reinforced the Christian ideas of a universe under the sway of a single divine power. The results of this absolutist way of thinking were, to Nietzsche, disastrous. It sacrificed the vital force of living human beings. It elevated a deadening abstraction--the abstraction of absolute certainty. This satisfied the human desire for certainty; but it did so at the cost of a "slave morality," fueled by an unquenchable resentment. Nietzsche wanted to transvalue all values based on this faulty way of western thinking, traceable to Plato-Socrates. The new values would be grounded in human experience. They would no longer refer to a transcendental or teleological order outside of human experience.
CHARLIE: It was this turn that made Nietzsche the patron saint of postmodern critical thinking.
BAKER: The rational itself, that ultimate Socratic instrument, came to be seen by Nietzscheans as an extra-human order. This most human of instruments came to be seen as capable of subordinating humans to totalistic control. This was the "tyranny" of the Enlightenment.
ABLE: Paul Stern's close reading of the Phaedo depicts a Socrates who does not match the picture drawn of him by Nietzsche.
CHARLIE: A Socrates for our times, it may be.
ABLE: Stern argues that Nietzsche was wrong to accuse Socrates of dogmatic rationalism. Stern methodically seeks to demonstrate that Socrates in his final day aligned himself with a human wisdom. Such a wisdom could be independent of immortal, supra-human entities or orders. It could be dependent on the accumulative building of understanding through the exercise of human reason on experience.
CHARLIE: An appealing man, who sees our human wisdom based on our ignorance of final truths.
ABLE: Stern's soon-to-die Socrates is not the foundation stone of the absolutist philosophy of western culture. He did not move from a feeling of resentment at failing to satisfy the human desire for certainty. He moved from a desire to know. This desire led him to see that one's ability to know is limited by the human situation. That situation denied him the ability to know for certain anything definitive outside his own experience. As he approached his death, Stern's Socrates abandoned the proofs of an immortal soul. With them, he abandoned a transcendental or teleological order as a basis for human knowledge or human satisfaction. Stern's Socrates in the end situates human wisdom in the human body. It is there that "Socratic rationalism" resides.
BAKER: "Socratic rationalism" takes on a different color here.
ABLE: It seems clear enough. This limited power of thought enables humans to deal with their desire for the absolute. It allows a human being to say, "My desire for knowledge leads to greater satisfaction than my desire for the absolute."
CHARLIE: Yes--the misdirected desire for the absolute leads humans to one of two destructive steps. One, they espouse a simple certainty without thinking any more about it. Or, two, they abandon hope of certainty and sink into total skepticism.
ABLE: Socratic rationalism, the desire for knowledge, avoids these totalistic solutions. It does not lead to finality. It leads to a search that has no end until the end of life itself.
CHARLIE: This is a salubrious message. It leads to the openness to life that Nietzsche celebrated.
BAKER: Stern's Socrates, then, if this is the right reading, appears to have anticipated Nietzsche by 2500 years.
ABLE: He did so by placing the power of thinking in the human being. He denied its dependence on a force, such as eternal Ideas, outside the thought of human beings.
CHARLIE: The irony is that Nietzsche failed to recognize a kindred spirit in Socrates. Then he vilified Socrates for something he did not do. Error on error.
BAKER: Nietzsche could be excused. He saw in Socrates what the western world said it saw all through the centuries.
ABLE: Stern's Socrates appears to be an astounding discovery for postmodern critical thinking. Postmoderns begin with the very assumption attributed to the dying Socrates: there is nothing but the process of human thought and action involved in human culture. There are no true metanarratives, no gods, no extra-human forces of destiny not of our own making. We have made up the grand drama that depicts human beings on the march toward an end or goal. Postmodern insight tells us that tragic narratives are cancelled. Such narratives highlight the failure of humans aspiring to ideal states set for them by superior powers outside or "above" them. No such ideal states are truly to be found.
CHARLIE: So--Nietzsche and all those "postmoderns" have Socrates wrong. It was not Socrates who made the fundamental mistake at the beginning of western culture--the creation of a philosophy of absolutism in an attitude of resentment. Stern rescues Socrates. And rejects Nietzsche.
ABLE: He rejects Nietzsche's accusation that Socrates originated the fundamental flaw of western civilization. But Stern does not reject Nietzsche's diagnosis of that civilizational flaw--the positing of the absolute. Instead, he offers us a means of dealing with that flaw. It is Socratic reason itself, a limited, earth-bound capability, a contingent but workable guide through the straits bordered by simplistic certainty and utter skepticism.
BAKER: We get the impression that Stern would rescue Nietzsche from himself if he could. That is, he would have liked to see Nietzsche seize upon Socratic reason as the instrument for the transvaluation of values in western culture.
ABLE: But when Nietzsche misread Socrates, he found "will to power" as that instrument.
CHARLIE: Are "will to power" and "Socratic reason" not rooted alike in the human body? Do they not have a common basis? Can Stern not allow that Nietzsche arrived at a Socratic mode by his own route?
ABLE: Unfortunately, Stern does not, in this book, pursue the question very far.
BAKER: It seems that by book's end Stern is ripe to undertake a comparision of the two concepts he has isolated, embodied Socratic reason and Nietzschean will to power. Stern is saying that Socrates also, in the final hours, at least, rejected extra-human foundations for the process of living.
CHARLIE: Just as Nietzsche rejected them, just as postmoderns reject them.
ABLE: Enough. It would be too hasty to leap to the conclusion that Stern brings Socrates to the postmodern table as a surprise gift.
CHARLIE: But it is an attractive picture-- a retrofitted, ancient progenitor of po-mo.... hidden from sight, indeed, outrageously misread all these centuries. What a spectacle. The very rock upon which western absolutist philosophy rested turns out to be human text.
ABLE: And yet enough. It would be too hasty for po-mos to seize Stern's Socrates. There is a need to analyze the question: Could Nietzschean "will to power" and Sternian "Socratic reason" cohabit?
CHARLIE: Heidegger's analysis of will to power waits to talk to us about that.
BAKER: Pending that, we have these insights from Stern to absorb:
One, western philosophy is not the monolith of trans-human absolutism that Nietzsche advances. Even at its origins in Plato, we see western culture had within it a seed of what has grown as postmodern critical thought . Stern could instruct us on the way "Socratic reason" and post-structural notions of language and meaning can coexist. Does the instability of human expression, operating in a field of language linked to feeling, offer a sufficient basis for a viable exercise of reason? How can two or more human beings--Socratic reasoners--express thoughts that can be shared and tested for operational effectiveness? Can humans live by text alone?
ABLE: Stern asks us "whether the suicide of reason is itself rational." (p. 181) He challenges Nietzsche: Are you a crypt-absolutist? Does your disappointed desire for certainty drive your response to the undeniable human perplexities? (pp 141-2)
BAKER: Two, seen by Stern as a dogmatist, Nietzsche may not deserve to be the patron saint of postmodern anti-foundational thinking.
CHARLIE: Can the sacrilegious be desacralized? Deleuzian fold on Deleuzian fold.