a model sophist

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 42, 2011.

Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

51

A Model Sophist: Nietzsche on Protagoras and Thucydides

Joel e. Mann and Getty l. lustila

abstract: While many commentators have remarked on Nietzsche’s admiration for the Greek historian Thucydides, most reduce the affinity between the two thinkers to their common commitments to “political realism” or “scientific natu-ralism.” At the same time, some of these same commentators have sought to minimize or dismiss Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the Greek sophists. We do not deny the importance of realism or naturalism, but we suggest that, for Nietzsche, realism and naturalism are rooted in a rejection of moral absolutism and its lead-ing advocates, Socrates and Plato. Through careful exegesis of crucial sections from Daybreak, we show that, as early as 1880 (if not earlier), Nietzsche regarded the agonistic, anti-absolutist stance of the sophist Protagoras as an indispensable model both for Thucydides’s history and for his own philosophy.

I. Preliminary Remarks on a Problem in Nietzsche Scholarship

In an essay titled “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” Raymond Geuss claims that Nietzsche “broke radically with the foundation of Western phi-

losophy” by taking the historian Thucydides as his philosophical model, thus rewriting a two-thousand-year-old narrative that places the genius of Plato and Socrates at its center.1 Nietzsche’s shift away from the dominant narrative, Geuss argues, is motivated by a commitment to realism.2 Nietzsche extols Thucydides for his impartiality and courage, for his ability to see reality, in all of its manifest injustice and foolishness, from an undistorted point of view. At the same time, he condemns Plato as a coward on account of his habitual “moralization” and “rationalization” of reality.3

It is difficult to deny that Nietzsche defines his thought as anti-Platonic throughout most (if not all) of his career. Early on, Nietzsche holds in high regard the pre-Socratic scientists, playwrights, poets, and philosophers, while he considers the emergence of Socrates and Plato something of a cultural catas-trophe. Intriguingly, Nietzsche never alters this account of Greek antiquity (at least not in its broad outlines).4 However, he does emend one of its finer points. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche regards the sophists as a class that includes Socrates and, perhaps by extension, Plato, noting that “Socrates appears in Aristophanes as the first and highest sophist, as the reflection and quintessence

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52 Joel e. Mann and Getty l. lustila

of all sophistic aspirations” (BT 13).5 Nine years later, in Daybreak, Nietzsche radically reverses his assessment of the sophists. Suddenly, he considers them instrumental in creating the intellectual climate that produced Thucydides, in whom “that culture of the most impersonal knowledge of the world comes to a final, effulgent efflorescence” (D 168). The sentiment is echoed seven years later in Twilight of the Idols: “[I]n [Thucydides] the culture of the sophists—that is to say, the culture of the realists—finds its perfect expression: this inestimable movement among the moral- and ideal-swindles of the Socratic schools that were breaking out everywhere” (TI “Ancients” 2).

Few would question the sincerity of Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Thucydides, though curiously few have tried, like Geuss, to understand that enthusiasm. Perhaps still fewer would allow that Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Thucydides is inextricably bound up with a positive assessment of the Greek sophists. While some scholars recognize that Nietzsche’s views on Thucydides and the sophists are of a piece, others argue that Nietzsche’s interest in Thucydides ought to be kept more or less separate from his opinion of the sophists—either because he took a dim view of them or because he had no settled view at all.6 Geuss, who treats the sophists as “mere” rhetoricians, is representative. Failing to recognize that Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Thucydides is occasioned by a reevaluation of the sophists, he surveys the “Thucydidean turn” through the lens of Nietzsche’s remarks in BT: “[I]nstead of Nietzsche’s stark Aeschlyean drama of two actors, tragedy and Socratic philosophy, there would be a more Wagnerian drama with a fuller cast […] the potential unborn children of Sophocles and Thucydides, and the two murderers: Socratic philosophy and rhetoric.”7 Most scholarship on Nietzsche and antiquity—if it mentions Thucydides and the sophists at all— follows the same or a similar pattern.8

It is easy to guess why Geuss and others would want to distance Nietzsche from the sophists, who historically have been regarded as crass relativists at best and unserious charlatans at worst. Though modern scholarship on classical philosophy has long since dispensed with this jaundiced caricature, no doubt prejudices linger.9 However, the more interesting problem for the Geussian view concerns its textual support. How can Geuss and others distance Nietzsche and Thucydides from the sophists when Nietzsche so clearly articulates in the same breath his appreciation for both the sophists and Thucydides? The answer may lie in the fact that while in his published works Nietzsche praises the sophists, he does so somewhat generically. He writes usually of the ‘sophists’ or ‘sophistic culture’ but tends not to single out particular sophists or distinctly sophistic philosophical claims. Since the sophists themselves did not constitute a coher-ent school of thought but were distinguished primarily by their profession—advanced teachers of rhetoric and oratory, among other subjects—Nietzsche’s historical claim, to the extent that he even intends to make one, may appear vacuous. One could be forgiven for thinking that Nietzsche’s appropriation of


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the sophists is itself more rhetorical than philosophical, designed ultimately to shock the casual Platonist rather than to convey genuine philosophical interest.

Those seeking to counter this trend have sought refuge in Nietzsche’s Nachlass. Here one finds explicit reference to individual sophists and their doctrines, especially those of Protagoras of Abdera. Even recently, special atten-tion has been paid to an unpublished aphorism from early 1888 on the subject.10 While Nietzsche’s remarks therein are significant and worthy of attention, the skeptic nevertheless may press the following points: The aphorism surfaces very late in Nietzsche’s productive career; further, despite its significance, it remains only one of a handful of explicit references in the Nietzschean corpus to a particular sophist; and, finally, building an interpretation of Nietzsche from Nachlass material is a dubious, if not dangerous, project in its own right.

We remain unconvinced by these skeptical objections but acknowledge the difficulty of deflecting them. Ideally, one would like explicit evidence from Nietzsche’s published works that he took substantive interest in Protagoras well before 1888. While there is no explicit evidence, we believe that there is overwhelming implicit evidence, and it is our intent with this essay to bring it to light. Our methodological starting point will be Nietzsche’s own suggestion that his aphorisms warrant whole essays in exegesis (GM P:8). Rising to the challenge, we will conduct an exegesis of D 168, making the case that Nietzsche regards Protagoras as a model for both Thucydides and himself. Along the way, we will discuss the aphorism in the context of Nietzsche’s other remarks concerning Thucydides, as well as its implications for the existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s relation to Thucydides and the sophists.

II. Protagoras, Thucydides, and the Agonistic Ethos

Nietzsche makes his first published statement linking Thucydides to sophistic culture in D 168. We contend that any successful reconstruction of Nietzsche’s views on Thucydides and the sophists must start with the raw materials supplied in this passage. It reads, in its entirety, as follows:

[i] A model.—What do I love about Thucydides? Why do I give him a place of honor higher than Plato? [ii] He takes the most inclusive and unprejudiced plea-sure [die umfänglichste und unbefangenste Freude] in everything typical of men and events and finds that to each type there belongs a quantum of good reason [ein Quantum guter Vernunft]. This he seeks to discover. [iii] He exhibits greater practical justice than Plato; he is no slanderer or belittler of men he doesn’t like or who have done him harm in life. [iv] To the contrary: by seeing only types he sees something great into and within all things and persons [alle Dinge und Personen]. For what would the whole of posterity (to whom he dedicates his work) have to do with that which was not typical? [v] Thus, in him, the “thinker of men,” that culture of the most unprejudiced knowledge of the world [jene Cultur der unbe-fangensten Weltkenntniss] comes to a final, effulgent efflorescence [vi] which



had in Sophocles its poet, in Pericles its statesman, in Hippocrates its physician, in Democritus its naturalist—that culture which deserves to be baptized in the name of its teachers, the sophists, and [vii] which unfortunately from this moment of baptism immediately starts to grow dim and incomprehensible—[viii] for now we suspect it must have been a very unconventional culture [eine sehr unsittliche Cultur], against which a Plato, along with all the Socratic schools, struggled! [ix] The truth is here so twisted and tangled that it makes one reluctant to unravel it. [x] So let the old error (error veritate simplicior) run its old course! (D 168; numeration ours)

Nietzsche introduces the section as one designed to provide a model or example to be followed. The two rhetorical questions, which compare Thucydides to Plato, presuppose a first: Which ancient figure serves as the best philosophical model? Nietzsche’s answer is designed to scandalize: The historian Thucydides, not Plato, is the model, though the latter is conventionally considered the greatest philosopher of antiquity.

Why does Nietzsche esteem Thucydides over Plato? The remainder of section 168 will develop an answer, though the careful reader of D will already by this point have some sense for the method of Nietzsche’s presentation. The call for a model does not emanate from a vacuum. Rather, it issues directly from the problem Nietzsche has posed in the immediately preceding section (D 167). There he takes the Germans to task for what he perceives to be their unconditional admiration for philosophical, political, and artistic heroes:

No, it is more advisable to make use of the good opportunity and try something new, namely, to grow in honesty toward ourselves and to transform ourselves from a people of pious repetition and bitter, blind animosity into one of conditional consent and benevolent opposition; next, however, to learn that unconditional gestures of reverence before persons are laughable, that even for Germans it is not disgraceful to retrain ourselves in this regard, and that there is a profound maxim worth taking to heart: “Ce qui importe, ce ne sont point les personnes: mais les choses.” This maxim is, like he who spoke it, great, brave, simple and taciturn,—just like Carnot, the soldier and Republican.—But dare one now speak in this way of a Frenchman to Germans, much less of a Republican? Perhaps not; yes, perhaps one dare not so much as recall what Niebuhr dared to say to the Germans of his time: no one gave him such an impression of true greatness as Carnot. (D 167)11

Nietzsche is imploring the Germans (and not just the Germans) to cultivate an attitude of “conditional consent and benevolent opposition.” The problem with “unconditional consent” seems to be that it elevates the personal value perspec-tive of a particular individual to the status of a universal and necessary truth. But there is no such unconditional value perspective, no Kantian categorical imperative that applies unconditionally to all. There are only particular value perspectives, only (in Kantian terms) hypothetical imperatives, each conditioned by the empirical situation of an individual and valid within the context of that situation. These conditional values—like the people who have them—may stand


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in opposition to each other: Disagreements over values are real and meaningful. However, no one value perspective may claim absolute authority over others as the unconditionally “true” standard.

According to Nietzsche, poor philosophical models include Plato but also the unnamed Kant, at whom the barbed end of Carnot’s maxim is aimed: “[W]hat is important is not persons, but things.” Kant’s ethics might fairly be character-ized as just such an “unconditional reverence for persons” insofar as it demands that, in the language of the formula of humanity, persons be treated as ends in themselves and never merely as things useful for achieving one’s own personal ends.12 Carnot reverses Kant’s imperative: Things matter far more than persons. The claim is not that persons are of no moral worth. By ‘things’ Carnot means “the way things are,” that is, the facts: Getting things right may require persons to offend each other, but a violation of human dignity might be a fair price to pay for truth. The Germans (so Nietzsche contends) would rather spare the persons and spoil the things. So Kant’s unconditional reverence for persons is implicitly diagnosed as a symptom of a culture sick with what might be labeled “interpersonal hypersensitivity.”

Careful analysis of D 168, subsection [i], requires in turn an understanding of D 167. Nietzsche is in search of a very specific philosophical model, one that evinces a certain “conditional” and “cheerfully agonistic” attitude toward other persons in the search for truth—what we will refer to as an “agonistic ethos.” Plato and Kant, for obvious reasons, do not fit Nietzsche’s bill. Thucydides, however, comes much nearer the mark, precisely because, as we read in [ii], he takes “the most inclusive and unprejudiced pleasure [die umfänglichste und unbefangenste Freude] in everything typical of men and events.” The nuance of Nietzsche’s German is difficult to render in elegant English. The syntactical proximity of the two adjectives, ‘umfänglichste’ and ‘unbefangen-ste,’ is underscored by their acoustic affinity, and Nietzsche draws attention to the common root of both: the verb ‘fangen,’ literally “to catch, capture, or seize.” The pleasure or joy (Freude) Nietzsche describes is one that “catches all,” that is, takes all men and events as its object. It is not “caught or hung up” in the personal prejudices of its subject. The phrase is probably intended paradoxically—Thucydides takes “impersonal pleasure,” or, in more Kantian terms, “disinterested interest,” in people. By implication, Plato is incapable of such impartiality, and the joke is on him: History’s most ardent preacher of epistemic impartiality fails to live up to his own standards. Nietzsche’s diction hints at an explanation for this failure. ‘Unbefangen’ may also mean unembar-rassed. Plato is embarrassed by his feelings, his sensuality. On the other hand, Thucydides appears capable of greater impartiality precisely because of his capacity for pleasure.

This capacity provides Thucydides with the insight that “to each type [of man and event] there belongs a quantum of good reason [ein Quantum guter



Vernunft].” Each distinct human perspective imposes a certain measure of order or reason on the world, and Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War reveals and revels in the richness of these human type perspectives. But the pas-sage is more than a comment on Thucydides. The reference to “reason” here is inspired by Kant. Further, the language of men and measures recalls the infamous homo mensura of Protagoras: “[M]an is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.”13 In fact, the rhythmic repetition of the words ‘persons’ and ‘things’ and their synonyms established by Nietzsche already in D 167 suggests the intriguing (if ultimately unverifiable) possibility that he has been unconsciously preparing his readers for the homo mensura.14

Why would Nietzsche connect Protagoras to Kant? One aim may be to identify with their respective “subjective turns” in epistemology. Historically, both exchanged philosophical obsession with the object of knowledge for an investigation of the subject of knowledge, but with markedly different results. While Kant identified the necessary and universal forms of subjec-tive experience, Protagoras by most accounts celebrated its contingent and idiosyncratic content. Still, the comparison is not inapt. Even today, one can find responsible analyses of Kant that draw the same parallel.15 More important, the parallel was drawn by the self-styled neo-Kantian materialist F. A. Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus, which, as has been widely documented, exercised considerable influence on Nietzsche’s thought at various points during his philosophical career.16 The influence of Lange’s “Kantian” interpretation of Protagoras has been discussed already by Stack, and we shall not belabor the point.17 For present purposes, it will suffice to note that Lange is remarkable for his praise of the sophists generally and that he takes Protagoras—and especially the homo mensura—as representative of sophistic thought. Protagoras, he claims, takes a subjective turn and, in so doing, anticipates Kant. (However, notes Lange, the Greeks stop short of the basic Kantian insight by failing to postulate a thing-in-itself, an unknowable reality behind appearances.) But Protagoras supersedes Kant by advocating a sensualism worthy of modern science.18

Protagorean sensualism, the epistemological doctrine that the senses are the ultimate source of genuine knowledge, collapses into subjective relativism according to Lange,19 and he is keen to emphasize ostensibly sophistic themes suggestive of relativism. Thus, he dwells on the thesis that “opposed state-ments are equally true” (a paraphrase of DK 80 B6a) and laments the fact that this insight is so frequently maligned and trivialized.20 Lange goes so far as to condense (from unexplained sources) a generically sophistic ethics, which, he claims, “expanded the [Democritean thesis that names for things are established by convenience] to all concepts, which in their eyes yielded the final consequence


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‘that even the difference between right and wrong is only conventional; thus, there is no absolute good: good is that which appeals to the knowing subject at each moment.’”21

Nietzsche describes a Thucydidean application of the homo mensura that splits the difference between Kant’s universal intersubjectivism and Protagoras’s subjective relativism. Not every man, much less “man” generi-cally, is a measure. Rather, each type of man is a measure, viewing the world in a distinctive way for a good reason. Reason, for Thucydides, is neither universal nor strictly personal: It is typal. Thucydides finds this reason even in the views of his enemies, while Plato is too petty to be objective. In [iii] Nietzsche accuses him of belittling and slandering his enemies, and the enemies Nietzsche has principally in mind are the sophists themselves, whom Plato gleefully humiliates in his dialogues. Thucydides, however, rises above such personal prejudice. This is demonstrated by the brilliance of the speeches he writes even for those figures he disliked or with whom he disagreed.22 It is thus that he elevates his subjects to the status of types: namely, psychological types. Nietzsche does not explain in [iv] precisely how Thucydides’s approach imbues his personalities with greatness, though the reference to posterity offers some clue. Nietzsche alludes here to Thucydides’s remarks on methodology at the opening of the History: “Perhaps the lack of a mythological element [in my account] will offer its audience no perception of pleasure. But whoever wishes to inquire into the evident truth of these and similar matters—that is, what happened and what will happen again at some point in accordance with human nature—he will judge this history to be of some use, as it was composed not as a contest-piece to be heard at the present moment, but rather as a bequest to all of time.”23 Thucydides eschews mythological accounts of the past in favor of psychological descriptions of the human condition, since it is these latter that future generations will find especially useful. A historical figure qua isolated individual is little more than a forgettable detail; qua psychological type, however, he accrues an explanatory power the significance of which transcends his historical period.

In [v] Nietzsche sums up Thucydides as a “thinker of men [Menschen-Denker],” that is, as a humanist and practitioner of the homo mensura principle. Thucydides is not preoccupied with the otherworldly; he is the last best expres-sion of “that culture of the most unprejudiced knowledge of the world” that devel-ops an objective view of the truth not by positing a supersensible realm of reality after the manner of Plato and Kant but, rather, by constructing a comprehensive picture from the myriad partial views of the world as seen through the eyes of distinct psychological types. We suggest that D 168 be considered together with other passages from the Nietzschean corpus (e.g., GM III:12) that articulate his positive epistemological thesis, what is usually referred to (for better or worse)



as his “perspectivism.” The details of this thesis are hotly debated and, we feel, outside the scope of the present essay.24 However, our analysis thus far suggests the following historical desideratum for a viable interpretation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism: It will account for the fact that Nietzsche traces the genealogy of his own epistemology back to Protagoras’s homo mensura by way of Thucydides’s History.

III. Sophists by Baptism

This desideratum is validated by Nietzsche’s enumeration in [vi] of the figures he regards as representatives of sophistic culture. These include (in addition to Thucydides) the tragic poet Sophocles, the Athenian politician Pericles, the Ionian physician Hippocrates, and the atomist Democritus. Together they con-stitute a “culture which deserves to be baptized in the name of its teachers, the sophists.” The reference to the Christian ritual of baptism is ironic—Nietzsche has already praised Thucydides for his humanism, and Protagoras was infa-mously agnostic (DK 80 B4). Indeed, the passage as a whole is puzzling. None of the figures mentioned are traditionally regarded as sophists in their own right. So a plausible interpretation of D 168 must explain why Nietzsche baptizes them as such. Furthermore, it must do so in a way that connects this baptism to the dominant themes of the section. We should not assume from the outset, however, that each of these “sophists by baptism” is sophistic in the same way, that is, that Nietzsche’s notion of “sophistic culture” may be strictly analyzed in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership. Though it is possible that all possess a singularly “sophistic” trait, the resemblance between them may be more familial than formal.

We shall start with Sophocles, perhaps the most curious of the group. Nietzsche’s admiration for Sophocles is long-standing. Along with Aeschylus, he was portrayed already in BT as the quintessential tragic dramatist, while Euripides was branded a Socratic and a sophist for his rationalizing, rhetorical tendencies (BT 13). Suddenly, in D, Sophocles is the sophist, and Nietzsche provides us with some explanation in D 240, “On the morality of the stage.” There he criticizes the habit of interpreting a character’s tragic end on the stage as an indication of the playwright’s moral opprobrium. Considering the case of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Nietzsche writes that “whoever is of the opinion that Shakespeare’s theater has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth inevitably purges the evil of ambition, is in error. And he commits yet another error if he believes that Shakespeare felt as he does. Whoever is truly possessed by raging ambition sees this, his image, with pleasure. And if the hero dies for his passion, this is precisely the spiciest seasoning in the hot drink of his passion. Does the poet really feel any differently?” (D 240).


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As with Thucydides’s approach to historical depictions, Shakespeare refrains from imposing a universal moral judgment on his characters. Instead, he takes a sort of aesthetic pleasure in their passion. The same is true of Sophocles’s dramatis personae:

So much less does the tragic poet with his images of life take sides against life! So much more does he cry: “It is the charm of all charms, this agitating, chang-ing, dangerous, gloomy, and often sun-soaked existence! It is an adventure to live,—take whatever side you want, it will always retain this character!”—So he speaks to us out of a restless and powerful time, half-drunk and dazed from its own excess of blood and energy,—from a more evil time than ours: on which account we find it necessary to adjust and justify the aim of a Shakespearean drama for ourselves, that is, to not understand it. (D 240)

The many affinities with D 168 are striking, but especially remarkable is the ethos of “benevolent opposition.” Nietzsche attributes to Sophocles, as he did to Thucydides, an objectivity that sees in even the most objectionable character an adventure and enticement to life. This is the tragic protagonist’s “measure of reason,” which we moderns intentionally misunderstand. To understand him on his own terms would be to concede the validity of what to us is a morally inconceivable perspective.

Not coincidentally, Pericles praises this same attitude of benevolent opposi-tion—translated now into a political context—in the famous funeral oration recorded by Thucydides in his History (2.35–46). Nietzsche refers frequently in his work to the funeral oration, and he seems to have been impressed by the analysis of Athenian culture therein.25 In an aphorism from Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche asserts a natural tension between the security of the state and the cultural development of the individual, arguing that “as evidence to the contrary one should not rely on Pericles’ encomium: for the speech is but a great optimistic illusion concerning the ostensibly necessary relationship between the polis and Athenian culture; Thucydides lets it blaze once more like a transfigur-ing sunset before night falls on Athens (the plague and the radical break with tradition), a sunset one ought to use to forget the terrible day that preceded it” (HH I, 474). Though the above aphorism was published in 1878, three years before D 168, already Nietzsche sees Pericles as representative of a peaking Athenian culture, one well into its decline during the time of Socrates and Plato. It is often claimed that Nietzsche is unsympathetic to statism on the grounds that it stifles individual excellence. However, the cultural climax Pericles describes is made possible only by a critical mass of highly developed individual persons. We are not interested in entering the debate concerning Nietzsche’s “political philosophy,” if such a thing can rightfully be said to exist. Still, Nietzsche understands that one would be tempted to adduce Athens in the Periclean age as evidence against his suggestion that the state is naturally hostile to exceptional cultural development.



Here are the exact words that Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles in the History:

For we pursue nobility without concern for its cost, and we pursue wisdom without becoming soft. […] We are the ones who reflect on the correct course of action, or at least make the final decisions about such matters, since we think that it is not speech that damages deeds, but rather taking the necessary action before being instructed through speech. For this marks a major difference between others and us: we especially have the courage to deliberate thoroughly about the matters we will take in hand: others are bold through ignorance, and their deliberation is accompanied by hesitation. But they are justly judged to be the toughest-minded who are clearly aware of the pains and pleasures involved and yet do not turn away from danger on their account. (2.40)

The “deliberation” and “instruction through speech” Pericles mentions are the highly rhetorical, often polemical, public policy debates before the Athenian assembly. Defeating others in a public battle of oratorical skill was seen as the key to gaining and keeping political power in Athens, and a sense for the importance of rhetoric and competition diffused the entire culture. Nietzsche recognizes the connection between Periclean Athens and the agonistic ethos of Athens years before Daybreak:

Every great Hellene passes the torch of competition; every great virtue sparks a new greatness. If the thought of Miltiades’ laurels prevented the young Themistocles from sleeping, so for the first time in his long rivalry with Aristides did that earlier-awakened drive unleash itself, that drive for the uniquely remarkable, purely instinctive genius for political affairs described for us by Thucydides. How characteristic was that question and answer, when a particular opponent of Pericles was asked whether he or Pericles was the best wrestler in the city, and he answered: “Even if I throw him down, he’ll deny that he fell and thus achieve his purpose, persuading even those who saw him fall.” (HC; KGW III.2, p. 282)

It is worth noting that Nietzsche’s interpretive approach to Pericles and the funeral oration is not particularly original or nuanced. Thucydides is taken to reproduce faithfully (in spirit if not in letter) the funeral oration delivered by Pericles. The politician’s rhetorical portrait is taken at face value: Pericles is the brilliant leader who sees Athens for what it is—a dynamic, agonistic, self-made culture—and unapologetically affirms its character in the face of existential threats both internal and external. At times Nietzsche identifies Pericles and Thucydides so closely that he scarcely bothers to distinguish the two.26 On occa-sion he uses the funeral oration not just as an indication of Thucydides’s views but also as a reliable index to broader cultural attitudes in historical Athens.27

If in Nietzsche’s mind Pericles and Thucydides are hardly distinguishable, Pericles becomes a crucial link in the chain binding Thucydides to the sophists. There is evidence that Pericles was an associate of Protagoras’s during the latter’s time in Athens, as, it seems, was Sophocles.28 Thus, Nietzsche’s incorporation of Thucydides, Pericles, and Sophocles into the Protagorean circle takes on an air of historical authenticity.


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The same cannot be said of his enthusiasm for Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine and founder of a famous medical school on the Ionian island of Cos. We can say very little about Nietzsche’s reception of Hippocrates.29 Surely Nietzsche would have admired the Hippocratic turn away from supernatural explanations of disease in favor of naturalistic accounts rooted in anatomical and physiological theory. This may have been enough for him to list Hippocrates in D 168: In an extremely raw aphorism from notes written in 1883, we find a cryptic reference to Thucydides as “the highest example of a break with his nation’s traditional aversion to anatomical practice” (“The Greeks as knowers of men,” KGW VII.1:8[15]). This is probably an allusion to Thucydides’s “Hippocratic” account of the Athenian plague in the History (2.35–46), an account well known for its explicit and utter rejection of the traditional theological, moral, and super-natural rationalizations of the disease in favor of empirical observation, physi-ological explanation, and anatomical description.30

The Hippocratic preference for the internal over the eternal perhaps motivates Nietzsche to group Hippocrates with Thucydides and Democritus in a more polished aphorism from summer 1885:

Morality is fundamentally hostile to science: Socrates was, anyway—and he was so because science takes things to be important, while things have nothing to do with “good” and “evil” and thus diminish the importance of the feeling for “good” and “evil.” Morality, it turns out, wants the entire man and his total strength to serve it: when man earnestly concerns himself with plants and stars, morality considers this a waste of someone who isn’t rich enough to waste. So it went in Greece once Socrates had injected into science the disease of moralization and science fell into decline; a height like that found in the attitude of a Democritus, a Hippocrates, or a Thucydides was never again attained. (KGW VII.3:36[11])

Note the allusion to Carnot’s maxim about the importance of things (as opposed to the moral importance of persons) from D 167. Democritus, Hippocrates, and Thucydides, as scientists, are men who measure the objects of their studies with an eye simply to “getting things right,” resisting the Socratic urge to subject all phenomena to a moral interpretation. For Socrates, moral categories like good and evil are not only metaphysically real but ontologically prior to the natural. Nietzsche’s criticism of Socrates echoes that made of Socrates’s student, Plato, in D 168. Not only is Plato intellectually dishonest when he despises persons who fail to recognize the supremacy of his morality, he is unoriginal. His aptitude for slander is a trait passed down from his master, who insisted that moral value was the only real value. Any endeavor—science especially—that did not recog-nize the supremacy of moral value was to be altogether disvalued.31

Democritus, who championed a mechanistic materialism that rejects universal teleological structures, stands in stark contrast to Plato and what Nietzsche might have termed his “unconditionally moralized” metaphysics. At the close of his lecture on the place of Democritus in pre-Socratic philosophy, Nietzsche draws from atomism a lesson in relativism worthy of Protagoras: “[M]aterialism is a worthwhile hypothesis of relativity in truth; accordingly, ‘all is false’ has been



discovered to be an illuminating notion for natural science. We still consider, then, all its results to be truth for us, albeit not absolute. It is precisely our world, in whose production we are constantly engaged” (PPP 130). The potentially relativistic implications of atomism might have been suggested by Lange’s Geschichte. For Lange casts the systems of Democritus and Hippocrates—to the virtual exclusion of all other pre-Socratic thinkers—as crucial developments on the way to Protagorean sensualism, which he regards as essentially relativistic.32 Perhaps more important, Lange emphasizes the Democritean rejection of final causes (including especially final causes of the theological variety) in nature. And it is on this point that Nietzsche directs his students, in the course of the lecture on atomism, to the Geschichte (PPP 126). It has also been suggested that Nietzsche’s association of Democritus and Hippocrates was inspired by his exposure to the Comtean positivist and Hippocratic scholar Émile Littré, whose collection of essays, La science de la point de vue philosophique, he read and annotated in 1881 (the year of D’s publication).33 In an essay on physiology, Littré praises Democritus and Hippocrates alone for rejecting the teleology of theological-metaphysical explanation of moral phenomena in favor of positivist accounts.34

At the very least, the Democritean and Hippocratic materialist systems provide a physical and ontological framework for the agonistic ethos. It would seem, then, that the agonistic ethos provides the central focus of meaning for Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘sophistic.’ One is sophistic, or is representative of sophistic culture, just in case one bears any number of relations to the agonistic ethos and its practice or promotion. Sophocles and Thucydides employ the attitude to create penetrating depictions of moral-psychological types in their drama and history, respectively. Pericles adopts the attitude in his political dealings, and he professes to support a complementary political structure. Hippocrates espouses a physiology and Democritus espouses a cosmology that make the agonistic worldview possible by eliminating transcendent teleology in their explanations of natural phenomena. To be a sophist, then, is to take part in a movement that rejects the notion of a moral reality “in itself.”

To this conclusion, however, we would like to add another observation. The practice of understanding and explaining values as cultural facts, that is, as phenomena to be studied scientifically, is made possible by the agonistic ethos. The conviction that absolute moral value is written into the fabric of reality is an obstacle to cultural objectivity. Geuss illustrates the point at Plato’s expense: “[M]orally reprehensible behavior must, he thinks, finally be a form of irratio-nality that is self-defeating, and this puts such narrow limits on his ability to understand humans that it renders him unfit to be a serious guide to the world in which we live.”35 The agonistic ethos, by contrast, inspires anthropology, and so it did in the classical period.


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Protagoras, for example, appears to have worked out a “progressive anthropology” outlining the history of human progress from a state of nature to a state of civilization. At least some of this is generally thought to have survived in the mythical “Great Speech” (megas logos), given by his character in Plato’s Protagoras (320c ff.).36 Incidentally, while at Basel University Nietzsche taught courses that included Plato’s Protagoras; of these, two focused exclusively on the Protagoras.37 Indeed, the “Great Speech” appears to have made some impres-sion on Nietzsche. During the same period in which he was lecturing on the Protagoras, we find the following reference to Protagoras in “Homer’s Contest”:

That which is of special artistic importance—for example, in the case of Plato’s dialogues—is mostly the result of a rivalry with the art of the orator, of the soph-ist, of the dramatist of his time, invented with the aim of his finally being able to say: “See! I, too, can do what my great rivals can; yes, I can do it better than they can. No Protagoras wrote such beautiful myths as I, no dramatist such a lively and engrossing whole as the Symposium, no orator composed such an oration as I put into the Gorgias—and now I reject and condemn all imitative art! Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator! (HC; KGW III.2, p. 284)

Nietzsche’s treatment of the sophists is strikingly nuanced. Unlike many commentators (including Geuss), Nietzsche distinguishes between mere orators like Gorgias and sophists like Protagoras, though the difference grounding the distinction is admittedly unclear.38 Perhaps more important for our purposes, Nietzsche connects Protagoras not to the homo mensura, agnosticism, or any of the particular doctrinal fragments for which he is best known but, rather, to the myth of the “Great Speech.”39

A version of “progressive anthropology” is found in other Greek prose writers from the fifth century bce. It is hardly a coincidence that the list of “anthro-pologists” includes principally Sophocles, Hippocrates, and Democritus. In the famous “Ode to Man” from Sophocles’s Antigone, the chorus marvels at the human cunning and invention that have allowed human beings not only to take control of nature (345–50) but also to develop laws and customs that make civilization possible (355–75). The Hippocratic treatise On ancient medicine (De prisca medicina) famously offers an anthropological account of the devel-opment of dietetic medicine that is often compared with the anthropologies of Protagoras and Democritus, the latter of whom would have been compelled to explain the emergence of complex human culture from an initial cosmic state of atoms in motion.40 Though interestingly and importantly different, these anthropologies have in common two fundamentally Nietzschean traits: First, they regard cultural practices and values as human artifacts, not as gifts from the gods; and, second, they explain the persistence of human values and social conventions in terms of their value for human flourishing, as opposed to divine teleology.41



Perhaps the most elaborate anthropology from the period is the “archaeology” found in the introduction to Thucydides’s History (1.2–20). There, Thucydides describes the cultural and economic development of the Greeks, especially the Athenians, starting from a prehistoric age. (Nietzsche already alluded to this introductory section in [iv] of D 168.) A briefer but still recognizable anthro-pology occurs also in the funeral oration (2.36–41), where Pericles chronicles Athens’s rise to power from humble ancestral origins on the strength of the customs its people have contrived. Notably, Athenian preeminence is explained by reference to its people and their values instead of to its gods and their provi-dence.

Our aim is not to analyze these various anthropologies in any detail. Nor is it Nietzsche’s aim. His intent in D 168 is to present Thucydides as a method-ological model by highlighting both his agonistic ethos and his anthropology. That Nietzsche regards these two as of a piece should hardly surprise us. Some anthropologists take it as axiomatic that no investigator can conduct a credible study of a culture and its values without adopting a relativistic stance.42 But Nietzsche wants also to trace Thucydides back to the elder sophist: Protagoras as a model for Thucydides and, ultimately, for himself. Nietzsche’s own agonistic ethos and anthropological impulses will culminate in his On the Genealogy of Morals. There, Nietzsche will develop his theory of moral types in the first essay and, in the second essay, give a history of humanity by way of its transition from a prehistorical animal state to one of civilization by means of a “morality of mores.” But it is here, in D, that Nietzsche first seems at least dimly aware of his own intellectual trajectory and its ancestry.

IV. Sophistic Specters

Those who, like Geuss, reduce Protagoras to a “mere” rhetorician and “naive” relativist will refuse to go along with our account of Nietzsche’s intellectual lineage. But our reconstructions of Nietzsche’s views are more than plausible. Indeed, to speak in the Nietzschean spirit of “sophistic culture,” “the sophistic movement,” “the new learning,” or the like has become commonplace, perhaps even standard.43 Moreover, it is generally agreed that an adequate analysis of sophistic culture will necessarily include discussion not only of Protagoras but of such figures as Sophocles, Pericles, Thucydides, Hippocrates, and Democritus.44 So the evidence provided from Nietzsche’s corpus is, after considered reflection, persuasive. What, then, lies at the root of Geuss’s revulsion? Let us consider a concrete case.

Concentrating on Thucydides’s account of the description and explanation of the sudden shifts in linguistic convention that took place during the civil war in Corcyra (3.82), Geuss hopes to demonstrate that Thucydides’s treatment


A Model sophist 65

of the event is incompatible with the typical “sophistic” approach. He quotes Thucydides’s History: “[…] [T]hey reversed the customary value of words for actions to conform with their own judgment. Irrational daring was considered loyal manliness, deliberative hesitation cowardice in disguise, wisdom a screen for unmanliness […]” (3.82; our translation). Perhaps one of the most famous passages from Thucydides’s work, this displays his clear recognition of the fact that the referents of terms shift under certain social-psychological conditions. Actions widely considered courageous in time A may be called cowardly at time B. The shifts themselves may be more or less extreme depending on the circum-stances at hand, but the reallocations are undeniably real and a result of various factors external to the language itself. As far as can be reasonably judged, the shift is not, strictly speaking, what a philosopher would recognize as a genuine modification in the meanings (i.e., Fregean senses) of ‘courage’ and ‘cowardice.’ Thucydides is not claiming that words can drastically shift in meaning through historical circumstance (though of course they can). Presumably ‘cowardice’ still means what it has always meant, namely, the tendency to feel excessive fear. What has changed is the application of that same term to different behaviors. So certain acts (e.g., waiting to attack) are misinterpreted as proceeding exclusively from cowardice, though they were previously considered indications of virtue (e.g., prudence).

Geuss makes much of the fact that Thucydides disapproves of the referential shift at Corcyra, and it is on this point that he stakes his argument against the “sophistic” interpretation of the History. Thucydides certainly has an agenda in penning this passage: He means to warn us that the shift in question is the product of a paranoid and wanton psychology carried away by war, something to be avoided at all costs.45 But from this Geuss concludes that a sophist, as a self-conscious relativist, could not take the Thucydidean posi-tion, for sophists lack the pedestal from which to criticize other expressions of value as false. Geuss’s argument is prima facie plausible but marvelously misguided—marvelously, in our view, because it commits precisely the twin philosophical and historical errors that Nietzsche tries to correct in D 168. Surely a relativist can, like Thucydides, disagree with and disapprove of the values that inform another’s action or belief. The relativist cannot, however, dismiss the conflicting value as false, and there is no evidence that Thucydides is advancing such a claim about the Corcyrans’ value judgments. Had he done so, it is difficult to see how he could escape the charge of metaphysi-cal moralizing that Nietzsche levies against Plato. In the course of praising Nietzsche for his adoption of Thucydidean, anti-Platonic method, Geuss takes Thucydides to commit the same fundamental mistake that compels Nietzsche to embrace Thucydides at Plato’s expense in the first place. Moreover, this misinterpretation is possible only if Geuss himself is, in this moment, making the very same mistake.



So while Geuss lays out the important features of Thucydidean inquiry early in the essay—its realism and empiricism, its objectivity, and its status as an “incipient form of Wissenschaftlichkeit”—he misunderstands the nature of the act of inquiry and its relation to the inquirer, which leads him into a crucial category mistake.46 Despite the fact that Thucydides is interested in the events he describes, he does not allow these interests to infect his inquiry. (This is precisely Plato’s cardinal sin, in Nietzsche’s eyes.) Thucydides does not disap-prove of the general phenomenon of referential shift any more than a zoologist would disapprove of the general fact that lions are carnivores. Still, the zoologist may disapprove of a particular lion’s intent to eat her, just as Thucydides may disapprove of the particular referential shift at Corcyra and Nietzsche may disap-prove of the particular reversal of classical values effected by early Christianity (GM I:14). The distinction between the general form of social transformation and its particular content opens up the space for Thucydides and Nietzsche, like the endangered zoologist, simultaneously to understand and disapprove.

Geuss falls into this category mistake, we submit, because he is still haunted by the “specters of sophistry.” That is, he has not fully exorcised the Platonic demon that demands an unconditional morality. What Nietzsche calls the “taste for the conditional”—what we have dubbed the “agonistic ethos”—is a rare thing indeed.47 Nietzsche wonders whether we are still capable of it, and this concern motivates his pronouncement in [vii] that “from this moment of bap-tism [sophistic culture] immediately starts to grow dim and incomprehensible.” Sophistic culture is difficult for us to fathom in part because we have so little information about the sophists’ actual views. Moreover, what information we have about their views is difficult for us to understand because we, like the modern interpreters of Sophocles lamented in D 240, are too moralistic to comprehend the “very unconventional culture [eine sehr unsittliche Cultur]” Nietzsche refers to in [viii].48 Again, the German thwarts easy translation into English. Nietzsche uses ‘unsittlich,’ usually translated as “immoral,” to dis-tinguish the “conditional” view of value—right and wrong are mere matters of convention, in Lange’s paraphrase of the sophists—behind the agonistic ethos from Socratic moralizing. But ‘unsittlich’ means also simply “uncon-ventional,” and so the phrase becomes an oxymoron: a culture without social conventions. Nietzsche is perhaps also playing on the antithesis between nature and convention typical of sophistic thought: The unconventional is the natural. The sophists have a more natural, that is, naturalistic and scientific, approach to questions of value.

Note, too, how deftly Nietzsche exchanges Plato for Socrates. Plato, who stands in opposition to Thucydides, carries on the battle he inherited from his teacher, and an intriguing set of parallels suggests itself. If Plato and Thucydides are second-generation antagonists, while Socrates is of an earlier generation, then who is Socrates’s proper antagonist? The answer, we take it, is Protagoras.


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Nietzsche casts the sharp difference between Thucydides and Plato as a battle between moralizers and immoralists that spans generations, a battle that Nietzsche rushes into on the side of his beleaguered sophists. But if Nietzsche is joining the fray, he is doing so at a very late stage when all has already very nearly been lost. Not only does unconditional morality dominate modern culture, but it has managed to erase almost every trace of the ancient texts that dared to oppose it. The most exhaustive extant analysis of Protagoras’s magnum opus, Truth, is Plato’s own Theaetetus! This is the force of Nietzsche’s lament in [ix] that “the truth is here so twisted and tangled that it makes one reluctant to unravel it.” Plato cannot be trusted to give us a true account of Protagoras’s Truth.

The problem, from a philological standpoint, is essentially insoluble, and Nietzsche has no interest in trying to refute the Platonic interpretation of Protagorean doctrine on textual grounds. So, he proclaims in [x], “let the old error (error veritate simplicior) run its old course!” The Latin phrase means “error is simpler than truth,” an allusion to the philological principle of lectio dificilior (harder reading), according to which the least transparent variant in a manuscript is to be preferred on account of the copyist’s tendency to simplify dif-ficult passages. Nietzsche is not suggesting that Plato makes a copyist’s mistake when characterizing Protagoras’s Truth in the Theaetetus and other dialogues. Instead, Nietzsche insinuates that the doctrine itself was too difficult for Plato to countenance. Lacking the courage to bear the hard truth about morality, Plato turned Protagoras into a straw man, easier both to refute and to ridicule.

V. Concluding Thoughts

If we are correct, it should come as no surprise that in Twilight of the Idols, written late in Nietzsche’s career, we find unmistakable echoes of D. Nietzsche identifies with the “sophistic culture” and its greatest exemplar, Thucydides; he attacks the so-called Socratic schools for the propagation of a moral error; and, paraphrasing Pericles’s funeral oration, he lauds the courage of the sophists, who face up to reality, namely, to the fact that morality is not real (TI “Ancients” 2). What Nietzsche admires in the sophists matches up well with his own unflinch-ing skepticism about morality and the practices that bolster it. As any student of Nietzsche will recognize, much of his later work is marked by the attempt to revalue the Christian notion of morality in the context of its actual human origins. This project, which reaches its fruition in GM, is a fundamentally sophistic project. For the method of genealogy itself displaces static conceptions of moral-ity by contextualizing values historically and revealing any attempt to portray values as absolute for what it is: fantasy at best, deception at worst. To Nietzsche, the sophists were among the first to see clearly the terrifying truth at the heart of the agonistic ethos: that values are contextual and conditional.49 This is the



sophists’ “realism” and the source of their greatness. Only slaves display “[this] worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional” (BGE 30).

To some, including ourselves, the prospect of a Nietzsche inextricably bound up with Protagorean relativism is terrifying. Thus, even scholars inclined to defend Nietzsche’s identification with sophistic culture have struggled to deny that he was a relativist in any meaningful sense.50 Our purpose in this article has been to uncover evidence of the importance of Protagoras to Nietzsche’s view of Thucydides and thus to push the discussion beyond the psychological and political themes that so often dominate. If we have thereby discovered textual and historical reasons for suspecting that Nietzsche may have endorsed relativ-ism in some form, then these suspicions will have to be assimilated into current interpretations. As much as we might sympathize with Geuss’s instinct to flee, we should not follow suit. Nietzsche considers himself sophistic. Instead of running from this truth, we should endeavor to explain and understand it. Why would Nietzsche ally himself with figures and philosophies so provocative and divisive that even his most enthusiastic interpreters cannot accept it? To answer this question, we ourselves must have the courage to come to terms with reality.

St. Norbert College [email protected]

Georgia State University [email protected]

notes1. Raymond Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” in Outside Ethics (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2005), 219–33, at 219.2. Following Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1993), 163–64.3. Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” 220.4. See, for example, James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2000).5. All translations from languages other than English are our own. The only exceptions

are quotes from Nietzsche’s lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers, which rely on Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, ed. and trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

6. For the former, see Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002), 43–53; and Joel E. Mann, “Nietzsche’s Interest and Enthusiasm for the Greek Sophists,” Nietzsche-Studien 32 (2003): 406–28. For the latter, in addition to Geuss, see Thomas Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Disinterest and Ambivalence Towards the Greeks Sophists,” International Studies in Philosophy 33 (Fall 2001): 5–23; and his “Nietzsche’s Relation to the Greek Sophists,” Nietzsche-Studien 34 (2005): 255–76.

7. Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” 229.8. Of the relatively recent book-length studies of Nietzsche’s relation to antiquity, most

contain little or no discussion of Thucydides and the sophists. See Dale Wilkerson, Nietzsche and the Greeks (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2006); Enrico Müller, Die Griechen im Denken


A Model sophist 69

Nietzsches (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); and Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. The lone exception is Jessica N. Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), though her treatment of the topic (186–89) is constrained by her interest in the Greek skeptics. Most of the literature on Nietzsche and the sophists (cataloged in Mann, “Nietzsche’s Interest and Enthusiasm for the Greek Sophists,” 406n1), which is of extremely uneven quality, fails to make the connection to Thucydides.

9. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1977), was perhaps the first sustained study in English to vindicate the philosophical seriousness and importance of the sophists. Since then, many others have followed in its wake. See G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Patricia O’Grady, The Sophists: An Introduction (London: Duckworth Publishing, 2008); Paul Woodruff and Michael Gagarin, “The Sophists,” in An Oxford Handbook to Pre-Socratic Philosophy, ed. Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 365–84; and Joel E. Mann, “Causation, Agency, and the Law: On Some Subtleties in Antiphon’s Second Tetralogy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, forthcoming. This list by no means exhausts the relevant literature.

10. The aphorism in question is “Philosophy as decadence” (KGW VIII.3:14[116]). See Brian Leiter, “Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement: Developing an Argument from Nietzsche,” On the Human, March 25, 2010, http://onthehuman.org/2010/03/moral-skepticism-and-moral-disagreement-developing-an-argument-from-nietzsche/. Also see the subsequent reader comments.

11. Lazare Nicolas Marguerite, Comte Carnot (1753–1823), was a French engineer and mathematician who helped organized the French Republican Army during the French Revolution and became a prominent Republican politician. Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) was a German diplomat and well-regarded historian of the Roman Empire. Here Nietzsche appears to paraphrase Niebuhr’s recollection that “there were among [the French Republicans] two men that especially caught [my] attention: Mirabeau, whose mind and talents [I] reckoned among the greatest of modern times, however unappealing his moral character; and Carnot, whom [I] admired also as a human being” (Lebensnachrichten über Barthold Georg Niebuhr [Hamburg: Perthes, 1838–39], 16).

12. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 36.

13. Hermann Alexander Diels and Walther Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Zurich: Weidmann, 1951), DK 80 B1. Unless otherwise noted, all references to fragments of pre-Socratic philosophers are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by way of the standard edition by chapter, section, and item; thus, “DK 80 B1” refers to chap. 80 (Protagoras), sec. B (fragments), item 1, which in this case is a quote from Sextus Empiricus attributing to Protagoras the doctrine traditionally referred to as the homo mensura, also known as the “man–measure doctrine.”

14. Some of Nietzsche’s literary and philosophical applications of the homo mensura are discussed in Mann, “Nietzsche’s Interest and Enthusiasm for the Greek Sophists,” 417–24. See also Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Relation to the Greek Sophists,” 266–71.

15. See Daniel Bonevac, “Kant’s Copernican Revolution,” in The Age of German Idealism, ed. R. C. Solomon and K. Higgins, vol. 6 of The Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson and Stuart Shanker (London: Routledge, 1993), 40–67.

16. George Stack, Nietzsche and Lange (New York: de Gruyter, 1983); Thomas Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jörg Salaquarda, “Nietzsche und Lange,” Nietzsche-Studien 7 (1978): 236–53. According to Brobjer, there is some evidence that Nietzsche reread Lange in or around 1881 (Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, 221).



17. Stack, Nietzsche and Lange, 61, 93, 196–97.18. F. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart

(Iserlohn: Baedeker, 1866), 14–15. To be sure, Lange’s reconstruction lacks a certain precision. Protagoras’s homo mensura is essentially equated with the sophists and, further, with “four theses” of sensualism: (1) the person is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are, of those that are not, that they are not; (2) opposed statements are equally true; (3) all thinking depends on sensation; and (4) the feeling of pleasure is the fundamental motive of action.

19. Ibid., 15, 128.20. Ibid., 15. DK 80 B6a quotes from Diogenes Laertius’s account of Protagorean doctrine:

“[C]oncerning every matter, two arguments stand opposed to each other.”21. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 15–16.22. We follow the majority of scholars on this point. See Paul Woodruff, introduction

to Thucydides: On Justice Power and Human Nature: Selections from “The History of the Peloponnesian War,” ed. Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), xxi–xxv; Emily Greenwood, Thucydides and the Shaping of History (London: Duckworth Publishing, 2006); Tim Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1991), 343–74. Despite the wide interpretive disagreements among these authors, there is consensus on this point.

23. Thucydides, Historiae (History of the Peloponnesian War), 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), 1.22; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by book and chapter.

24. In this respect, we owe much to discussions by Leiter and Clark. See Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality; and Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For reasons that will become clear, we are sympathetic to revisions attempted by Hussein, who locates Nietzsche’s epistemology in the context of nineteenth-century sensualism, and Berry, who places Nietzsche in the ancient skeptical tradition. For the latter, see Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition. For the former, see Nadeem J. Z. Hussain, “Nietzsche’s Positivism,” European Journal of Philosophy 12 (2004): 326–68; and his “Reading Nietzsche Through Ernst Mach,” in Nietzsche and Science, ed. Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), 111–32.

25. E.g., BT P:4; HH 259; GM I:11; notes from WPh in 1875 (KGW IV.1:3[41]); notes from 1875 at KGW IV.1:5[200]; notes from 1874–75 at KGW VII.3.35[42].

26. E.g., BT P:4.27. E.g., HH 259.28. Plutarch attests to a conversation between Pericles and Protagoras (Pericles, 36), and

there is good reason to think that Protagoras had an impact on Pericles’s political thought (Neil O’Sullivan, “Pericles and Protagoras,” Greece and Rome [2nd series] 42, no. 1 [April 1995]: 15–23). The case for the link between Pericles and Sophocles is more disputed. As prominent Athenians, they certainly ran in the same circles, and Viktor Ehrenberg (Sophocles and Pericles [Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1954]) suggests a very close relationship, though the evidence is ambiguous.

29. There is no evidence that Nietzsche undertook any prolonged or intense study of the Hippocratic corpus. As far as we know, none of the Hippocratic works was ever a part of his personal library. We assume that a philologist of Nietzsche’s particular background and interests would have had a general sense for the character of the corpus but little knowledge of specific texts. If Nietzsche directly engaged either the Hippocratic corpus or the contemporary commentary on it, he could have come away impressed by the rhetorically stylized features of certain works, features commonly regarded as evidence of sophistic influence. By the late nineteenth century, the sophistic character of certain pseudo-Hippocratic texts had started to make an impression on philologists, as evidenced by the publication of Theodor Gomperz, Die Apologie


A Model sophist 71

der Heilkunst: Eine griechische Sophistenrede des fünften vorchristlichen Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Tempsky, 1890).

30. C. N. Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929); Georg Rechenauer, Thukydides und die Hippokratische Medizin: Naturwissenschaftliche Methodik als Modell für Geschichtsdeutung (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1991).

31. Nietzsche perhaps has in mind Socrates’s apparent disregard for technical knowledge and skill in the Apology (22c–d). According to Xenophon, Socrates actively campaigned against advanced study of the technai on the grounds that such sophistication was irrelevant to human well-being (Memorabilia 4.7.2 ff.; Xenophon is cited by book, chapter, and section). Between the years of 1875 and 1879, Nietzsche sustained an interest in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, 258).

32. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 6–12.33. Joel E. Mann, “Prescribing Positivism: Nietzsche’s Hippocratism,” paper presented at the

Pacific Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, San Francisco, March 31–April 3, 2010 (International Studies in Philosophy, forthcoming).

34. Émile Littré, La science au point de vue philosophique (Paris: Didier, 1961), 289–90.35. Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” 220.36. The central themes in Protagoras’s “Great Speech”—that justice is not innate to human

beings, that it is wholly separate from scientific reasoning, and that it arose historically as a function of biological and environmental need, just to name a few—can and should be compared with Nietzsche’s views on morality. Unfortunately, such a project lies outside the scope of our immediate aims in this essay.

37. In winter 1869–70, Nietzsche taught at the Basel Paedagogium a more general course on Plato that included the Protagoras. In spring and winter 1872, he taught courses on the Protagoras itself, one at the university and one at the Paedagogium (Karl Schlechta, Nietzsche-Chronik: Daten zu Leben und Werk [Munich: Hanser, 1975], 31, 39). He taught another general course on Plato, including the Protagoras, in winter 1875 at the Paedagogium (Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, 213).

38. If Plato can be trusted, Protagoras claimed to be wise (the literal meaning of the term sophist in Greek) and also to possess expert knowledge in what we would today recognize as political and ethical theory (Protagoras 317b–c, 318a–b, 319a). Gorgias, on the other hand, claimed to be an orator and aimed more modestly to teach others to persuade by speaking well (Gorgias 449a, 452e). Nietzsche may follow Plato, then, in regarding Gorgias as preoccupied exclusively with the form and style of speech while taking sophists proper to be concerned also with its conceptual content, particularly with respect to practical questions. Such a distinction is consistent with our understanding of Nietzsche’s other remarks on Protagoras and the sophists.

39. The Protagoras is of interest also because it depicts a conference of sophists in orbit around Protagoras. (Gorgias, it should be noted, is not a character.) The atmosphere is competitively charged, each sophist vying to demonstrate his superior brilliance—a dramatic illustration of the agonistic ethos that so captivates Nietzsche.

40. Ralph Rosen, “Towards a Hippocratic Anthropology? On Ancient Medicine and the Origins of Humans,” paper presented at the 13th Colloquium Hippocraticum, Austin, August 11–13, 2008.

41. There is some debate over the nature and extent of Democritus’s anthropology. Without a doubt, Nietzsche would have been familiar with at least some of the fragments having anthropological or ethnological themes. Some (e.g., DK 68 B 144) deal with the development of the arts, especially music, and Porter provides convincing proof of Nietzsche’s interest in the Democritean theory of music (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 95–106). Lange also mentions Democritus’s writings on ethnology (Geschichte des Materialismus, 9). In any case,



ancient testimonia firmly establish Democritus’s interest in these areas. But the reconstruction of a robust anthropological theory, based on a problematic attribution in Diodorus Siculus, was not undertaken until 1912 by Karl Reinhardt (“Hekataios von Abdera und Demokrit,” Hermes 47 [1912]: 492–513). A defense of Reinhardt’s thesis on different grounds is attempted in Thomas Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (Chapel Hill: Press of Western Reserve University, 1967). Though he never makes explicit mention of Nietzsche, Cole suggestively titles his fifth and sixth chapters “The Genealogy of Morals (Epicurus)” and “The Genealogy of Morals (Polybius).” For a critical reaction to attempts to reconstruct Democritus’s anthropology, see E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 10–11.

42. We have in mind here classic twentieth-century statements on anthropology and ethics such as Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology 10 (1934): 59–82.

43. See Guthrie, Sophists; Kerferd, Sophistic Movement; and Woodruff and Gagarin, “Sophists.”

44. Again, see Guthrie, Sophists; Kerferd, Sophistic Movement; and Woodruff and Gagarin, “Sophists.” The view of one commentator best demonstrates the extent to which Nietzsche’s broader, doctrinal conception of the sophists anticipated, perhaps even influenced, more recent developments: “[T]here is not really a single definition of ‘sophist’ on which all are agreed and which includes all those who have been called by this term. According to one definition, the sophists were a class of professional teachers; but this view excludes the historian Thucydides and the poet Euripides, who are often referred to as sophists. Another view defines them according to their ideas and areas of interest: yet they were not a philosophical ‘school,’ and there was no discrete ‘doctrine of the sophists.’ It can be broadly stated that those referred to as sophists shared a general scepticism about the possibility of certain knowledge or ultimate truth, and in some cases denied the existence of an objective truth outside the minds of men. Also, that they concentrated on the everyday contingency of living, admitting a relativism with respect of law and belief, since they upheld that such things were not god-given and eternal, but only man-made, mutable and variable from place to place” (Christine Farmer, “Was Socrates a Sophist?” in O’Grady, Sophists, 164–74, at 164).

45. Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams,” 228–29.46. Ibid., 229.47. See Nietzsche’s remarks at BGE 30.48. The point is reinforced by subsequent sections: D 169 and 170, entitled “The Hellenic very

foreign to us” and “Different perspectives of feeling,” respectively.49. See especially KGW VIII.3:14[116], VIII.3:14[147].50. Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 44–47.


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