Bookbag: Alexander Nehamas' Nietzche's Genealogy

For all inheritors of Rieff's dandyism:

We are therefore faced with at least two conceptions of philosophy. One avoids personal style and idiosyncrasy as much as possible. Its aim is to deface the particular personality that offers answers to philosophical questions, since all that matters is the quality of the answers and not the nature of the character who offers them. The other requires style and idiosyncrasy because its readers must never forget that the views that confront them are the views of a particular type of person and of no one else.

For Evan:

Now if the insight afforded by ancient tragedy is at all relevant to the problem of Socratism – that is, if, as Nietzsche suggests, tragedy and Socratism are fundamentally at odds – then, I think, tragedy must be understood as an expression of the fact of the culture’s authority for its memebers. As such, tragedy allows the Greeks to see through Socratic confusion about obedience. The effect of tragedy must, Nietzsche suggests, be somehow to remind the audience that good sense cannot be made of the idea that their membership in this particular culture is – in a philosophically relevant sense – “merely” a fact about them. Only this effect would silence the Socratic demand for reasons in a way that did not amount simply to ignoring it.

. . . We might put these points in the following terms: Socrates understands what I have called “membership in culture” to be a matter of applying one’s culture’s standards to the world. In other words, he takes membership to be a matter of interpreting the concepts of that culture as one’s fellow members do. [However] from the tragic point of view, when I call something courageous, it makes no sense to say that I am interpreting the concept in a particular way.