Nietzsche on Thucydides I. a Role Model

Nietzsche on Thucydides

I. A Role Model: what do I love about Thucydides, what causes me to honor him more highly than Plato? He has the most comprehensive and most uninhibited joy in everything which is typical about humans and events, and he thinks that a little bit of good rationality is in each type; it is this which he seeks to uncover. He has a greater practical justice than Plato; he does not demean or belittle those people whom he doesn’t like, or who have harmed him in life. On the contrary: he reads into, and attributes to, all things and people something great.

II. The persons of Thucydides speak in sentence of Thucydides: they have, according to his concept, the highest possible degree of rationality, in order to bring about their affairs. In this place I discovered the Greeks (a few words from Plato, as well).

III. Basically, morality is opposed to rationality … for this reason, rationality declined quickly in Greece, when Socrates introduced the disease of morality into rational thought; a high point, like in the thoughts of Democrites and Hippocrates and Thucydides, was not reached a second time.

IV. In relation to Plato, I am a thorough skeptic, and was never in the condition to add my voice to the chorus of praise, which is common among the learned people, for the artist Plato … Plato throws … all forms of style together, he is thus a first decadent of style … Plato is boring … my refreshment, my preference, my cure from all Platonism was always Thucydides.

V. It is not a silly question [to ask] if Plato would not have found a still higher type of philosophical human, which is now lost to us forever, [had he] remained free of Socratic enchantment. One looks into the times prior to him as [one looks into] a sculptor’s workshop of such types.

VI. In order to endure Socrates, Plato transforms him!

Nietzsche's views on Thucydides can be, in part, understood in the context of one of his larger recurring theme, which is transcending the moral evaluations of “Good and Evil”, as in the title of his book, “Beyond Good and Evil”: he wants to replace good/evil with good/bad, by which he means to replace a moral valuation with a qualitative valuation.

Thus, e.g., he might call a murder “good”, if the murderer was very good at murdering. The murderer would be exemplifying excellence.

So, when Thucydides shows us the major political and military leaders during the Peloponnesian War behaving in morally repulsive ways, that doesn't prevent Nietzsche from calling those leaders “great”, because those leaders were really very good at being morally repulsive.