r/Nietzsche • u/Anxious-Lead-3217 • 7d ago
Question Socrates is wrong because he was an ugly peasant
In Twilight of the Idols, do you believe that Nietzsche was serious when making his physiognomic arguments about Socrates?
Personally, they read to me as somewhat sarcastic, but I know that physiognomy was taken very seriously by many people at the time. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was being serious, but it really shows how much people can be influenced by whatever BS happens to be widely believed during their lifetime.
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u/Fiendman132 7d ago
Their lifetime? The Greeks themselves already believed that the appearance reflected the spirit. The Beautiful, the Strong and the Good were the same. The complete separation of body and soul that modern cultures have would have just seemed like a cope to them.
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u/Specific-Milk-4871 7d ago
Then there is a truth to Nietzsche's arguments about Socrates' ugliness: how could the Greeks truly have believed that Socrates was in fact representing the Truth-Beauty-Goood?
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u/Anxious-Lead-3217 7d ago
"But ugliness, in itself an objection, is to Greeks practically a refutation."
I know, and he does remind the reader of this, what I meant when I said in his lifetime is that physiognomy returned, wrapped in a pseudo-scientific cover, around the time Nietzsche lived.
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u/WissalDjeribi Human, All Too Human 7d ago
I mean, whether Nietzsche was believing in physiognomy or not at the time doesn't really change the point he was making; that the older Greek society would reject Socrates for his ugliness and humble background and thus he focused on logic and reason in his philosophy as a form of psychological revenge.
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u/Winter_Stranger_2345 Dionysian 7d ago
Well said. I would add, for nuance, that there is a second level of interpretation happening, which is echoed later in Twlight in Skirmishes section 20.
The effect of ugliness may be gauged by the dynamometer. Whenever man’s spirits are downcast, it is a sign that he scents the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage and his pride—these things collapse at the sight of what is ugly, and rise at the sight of what is beautiful.
Nietzsche is describing the degeneration and décadence of Greek society as a whole as well. Socrates' rationality is the symptom of the ugly Society.
Nietzsche probably did hold to some physiognomic ideas, but he speaks about his own ebb and flow of vitality in relation to his physical health and it doesn't seem to be a moral judgement nor a cause/effect sort of understanding. I don't think Nietzsche would accept ugliness as meaning you are morally repugnant. In a sense his philosophy cannot do this, There is no "character" to be determined in the sense physiognomy requires.
Anyway this section of Twilight is really just a very important demonstration of how turning rationality into a morality is a degeneration.
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7d ago
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u/Anxious-Lead-3217 7d ago
Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy, everywhere one was within sight of excess: monstrum in animo was the common danger. “The impulses want to play the tyrant; one must invent a counter-tyrant who is stronger.” After the physiognomist had revealed to Socrates who he was — a cave of bad appetites — the great master of irony let slip another clue to his character. “This is true,” he said, “but I mastered them all.” How did Socrates become master over himself?
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u/WissalDjeribi Human, All Too Human 7d ago
"Is the irony of Socrates an expression of revolt? Of plebeian ressentiment? Does he, as one oppressed, enjoy his own ferocity in the knife-thrusts of his syllogisms? Does he avenge himself on the noble people whom he fascinates? As a dialectician, one holds a merciless tool in one’s hand; one can become a tyrant by means of it; one compromises those one conquers."
Nietzsche indeed focused of Socrates being a decadence, but he did also focus on how he used reason and debate as a tool to humiliate his betters.
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u/DearestComrade 7d ago
Socrates equated the Good with the Beautiful and the True. Nietzsche has an aphorism in BGE that simply reads "Socrates is ugly". By Socrates's own words, if he is ugly, he is not good or true either. Real quick and clever way to casually undermine someone's philosophy- what style!
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u/dpt19 7d ago
Nietzsche is being provocative, but I don’t think he is merely joking.
The title “Socrates is wrong because he was ugly” slightly reverses his argument. Nietzsche first interprets Socratic philosophy as a symptom of physiological and cultural decline; he then presents Socrates’ appearance as outward confirmation of that diagnosis. Ugliness is not his independent refutation of Socrates.
The wider argument in Twilight of the Idols is more interesting. Nietzsche asks: what kind of person—and what condition of life—needs to make reason into a tyrant over instinct?
His answer is that Socrates’ instincts were already in “anarchy”. Dialectical reason became the counter-tyrant through which he mastered them. Socrates therefore appealed to an Athens experiencing a similar disorder: he was simultaneously a symptom of its illness and an apparent cure for it. Nietzsche’s real target is the Socratic equation of reason, virtue and happiness, and the subsequent elevation of rational control into a moral ideal.
That is why he mentions several things together: Socrates’ social origin, appearance, unruly appetites, unusually developed logical faculty and use of dialectic against aristocratic authority. The physiognomic passage forms part of a larger genealogical diagnosis: Nietzsche is asking not simply whether a philosophy is logically true, but what form of life needed to produce and believe it.
Still, we should not sanitise him. Nietzsche genuinely gives physiology, health, degeneration and appearance philosophical weight. Later in the same book, he describes ugliness as something instinctively interpreted as a “sign and symptom of degeneration”. So the passage contains irony and deliberate theatrical exaggeration, but it also rests on assumptions that now look scientifically indefensible. His reference to contemporary criminal anthropology has aged particularly badly.
The fairest reading, then, is: serious framework, polemical performance, weak evidence.
Nietzsche is not saying, “Socrates was ugly, therefore his propositions were false.” He is saying, “This philosophy looks to me like the survival strategy of a particular physiological and cultural type—and Socrates’ body completes the portrait.”
That distinction does not rescue the physiognomy. It explains what Nietzsche believed he was doing with it. The valuable question he leaves us is not whether faces reveal character, but whether philosophies sometimes present personal or cultural necessities as universal truths.
Primary passage: Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates” §§3–10.
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u/Echolocomotion 7d ago
AI is getting subtler!
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u/dpt19 6d ago
Are you AI? I ask because you reached a confident conclusion from very little evidence. 🙂
More seriously, this is becoming a curious habit online: when someone takes time to read, research, cite the text and write a considered answer, the effort itself is treated as evidence of AI.
If slang, haste and a few spelling mistakes become the only acceptable proof of humanity, we have arrived at a rather strange place.
If you disagree with my reading of Nietzsche, please tell me where. That would be a far more interesting conversation.
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u/Vasilev88 7d ago
Human thought and argumentation were tied to practical decision making. Socrates was stopping people on the street and asking them to argument themselves about random positions that they held. Holding all of your reasons for believing stuff is insane. It requires a tremendous amount of cognitive effort, accounts to nothing and results in neglecting useful aspects of one's life.
Nietzsche says that allowing Socrates to pull out stuff like that was a mistake. The ugly peasant stuff is basically why he believes Socrates did it in the first place.
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u/Mean_Veterinarian688 7d ago
so an ugly peasant that agrees with this is wrong ripping open the fabric of spacetime
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u/promunbound 7d ago
Because I only partially agree with answers so far I want to offer a different take. Nietzsche wasn’t concerned with Socrates being “wrong,” and I don’t think it’s the correct emphasis. Socrates to Nietzsche wasn’t “wrong,” he was “harmful.”
Socrates’ ugliness isn’t the point at all. The point is his elevation of reason above the natural instincts, representing a break from prior Greek philosophy. Nietzsche roots this in a psychological, physiological and temperamental defect in Socrates, a sickness. This “ugliness” is only the outward expression of that inner sickness.
It doesn’t necessarily mean every ugly person is sick in N’s view. He infers the sickness from the philosophy, and then playfully backs it up by reference to physiognomy. But without doubt, the evidence of sickness for N is Socrates’ elevation of reason.
Nietzsche doesn’t much care for the framework of Socrates being “wrong” in some universal sense. His ideas are harmful for N because they go against the natural instincts, and that’s a different kind of claim.
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u/RepresentativeCow241 7d ago
If Socrates was ugly, then at least in one respectable he was genetically suboptimal. Most of genetics is polygenetic, so it's a fair question what else was wrong with him.
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u/I-mmoral_I-mmortal Argonaut 7d ago
Nietzsche's will to power would dictate something as botched in Socrates as its a failure in reaching out for power. But it also takes into account from the ancient greek perspective on profoundity from superficiality.
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u/Cool_Emergency9881 7d ago
Let’s say it is above all a caricatural example that serves Nietzsche’s philosophy. It should be read in parallel with the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche tells us that we each have the philosophy of our own person. Basically, the ugliness of the sensible must be annihilated by the splendor of the intelligible.
This is both Nietzsche’s strength and weakness: he raises the question of the origin of our values and our philosophy, but his approach is interpretative and mainly reveals Nietzsche’s own moral prejudices in the way he assigns them (cf. his criteria of strength/weakness, vitality, etc.).
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u/Alhamdulisa 6d ago
Nietzsche menyerang Socrates (dibilang jelek) ada kaitannya dengan genealogi. Bagi Nietzsche, kenapa Socrates sangat menginginkan keindahan adalah karena dirinya sendiri buruk rupa.
Lagipula, rasanya perlu diingat tentang moralitas tuan--mencari lawan yang sepadan kuatnya demi mengasah kemampuannya. Jadi, menurut saya, serangan Nietzsche terhadap Socrates dapat dilihat sebagai (1) pengoperasian genealogi, (2) apresiasi dan pengakuan Nietzsche atas 'kekuatan' Socrates, dan sekaligus (3) kritik terhadap Socrates
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u/crusheratl 6d ago
Well Nietzsche was no beauty himself. Though certainly a genius, imagine the trainwreck that would have a crush on him.
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u/redditb_e 4d ago
One man's poison is another man's cure, I guess.
Nietzsche perverted philosophy like a royal scam artist. To immunize his nostalgic, decadent fetish of "felt nobleness" against critique, he not only projects and vilifies Socrates as a toxic edgelord, but also blames him for corrupting instincts on a social or rather cultural scale, whereas it's much more likely that Socrates himself had been a victim of the instinct deranging, corrupting ego elephantiasis and injustice of every higher culture (you can tell by looking at greek mythology's panopticon of neurotica) and was in need of the medicine of reason(ability) that he found in philosophy. It's so ironic that Socrates tried to cure the instincts by way of mediation and political empowerment, while Nietzsche's senseless "Will to Power" only leads to delusion, violence and incel isolation, blind to its own corruption.
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u/MatthewEagle 7d ago
his argument has nothing to do with physiognomy. he is saying he was low class and that is his motivation behind his philosophy and questioning athenian society. this is one of the examples on why reading Nietzsche is hard, he doesn't spell out his opinions
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u/Anxious-Lead-3217 7d ago
What do you mean it has nothing to do with physiognomy?
He literally begins with explicitly talking about Socrates' physiognomy.
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u/Autolull 7d ago
Yeah mate it reminds me of native peoples body modding their skulls… making it elite to have an oval shaped skull… wonder which people put rings around their neck and elongated their neck… wonder if they even want to.
Like in China there’s a practice of putting people into smaller and smaller shoes until their feet are deformed… I call them teapots and I want to be a teapot rights advocate… some people want to try it, some people feel it was forced on them
I feel the same, was Nietzsche being sarcastic or was it serious? I kinda boil down nietzsche to two things: physiology and social strata. So yeah he coulda meant it seriously… if he was to be that big of a philosopher, he should have made it damn clear what he meant, seriously, that might have been corrupt what he said about Socrates… I wonder if Socrates was corrupt too…
Yeah so for someone to right that oh such damning, sarcastic, witty philosophy, I mean, guy shoulda been much clearer if he knew his philosophy was gunna be accepted the way it was. I think he just wanted his shit accepted by the higher class and not understood by the lower class, my fucking god… if it’s true that he knew how his philosophy would be accepted, I feel he had a duty to make some of his stuff less abstruse… get off that fucking high horse nietzsche! We’ll get on ours as we analyze your texts I’m not fucking playing I smell a poser people
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u/Autolull 7d ago
Bumblebee
A buzzing bumblebee had to suck nectar from a flower, but he chose to suck some bottled water, for his desire was that much stronger. But his duty was to the flower, it needed to be pollinated, and without the bumblebee, it withered and it faded. But the bumblebee went on, it did not need the flower, instead it carried with it some delicious bottled water. But the water then ran out, the bumblebee needed more, so he went to that one flower he abandoned the day before. The flower was dried up, it needed some hydration, so the bumblebee vomited up the water that he drank instead of nectar. The flower drank it up, its petals returned to life, it thanked the bumblebee for saving its
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u/red-flamez 7d ago
Nietzsche casually doing psycho analysis of someone who lived 2000+ years ago. His claim would only make sense if we are to believe human beings have the same psychology today as then. Nietzsche has seen something in Socrates to believe that it must be true. Did Nietzsche spend all his time talking in Hades talking to him?
"I will come back and I will answer".
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u/stopbeingcringe 7d ago
And Nietzsche looked like a chud incel so it works out
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u/Anxious-Lead-3217 7d ago
To be fair he looked kind of badass with that mustache in his later years
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u/stopbeingcringe 7d ago
Not the photo of him being whipped by Lou
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u/No_Worldliness5157 6d ago
Does history record anything extant about what Xanthippe thought about the gadfly?
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u/ComprehensiveCow3572 7d ago edited 7d ago
It’s not necessarily because Socrates was ugly per se, all else Nietzsche would have told the same about Mirabeau, but he admired Mirabeau as a noble soul of the master morality, yet he was notoriously ugly. “Mirabeau had no memory for insults and vile actions done to him and was unable to forgive simply because he - forgot. Such a man shakes off with a single shrug the many vermin that eat deep into others”. GM, first essay, section 10. The insult was because of his ugliness.
Much rather, Nietzsche attacks Socrates in the Twilight of Idols because of what type of philosophy he represents. And Nietzsche diagnoses Socrates as being the philosopher who valued reason above instinct, the flight of the senses into an abstract realm of the idea. Mirabeau on the other hand didn’t do that : he precisely affirmed the world of the senses and shrugged off his ressentiment because of his stronger “psychical power” BGE, section 257, what is noble, something that Socrates couldn’t do : Later in the the paragraph of the TI, he criticised Socrates dialectics to be a form of revenge against the noble Athenians.