Tying the Threads Together: The Political Significance of Young Nietzsche’s Reception of Plato’s Symposium

Abstract

Nietzsche’s 1864 student essay, “On the Relationship of the Speech of Alcibiades to the Rest of the Speeches in Plato’s Symposium” uses the image of a knot (Knoten) to capture the dynamic tension between the speculative orientation of Socrates and the practical orientation of Alcibiades, that is, between theory and life. This image of the “knot” as a dynamic tension between philosophical principles is a forerunner of the position Nietzsche will develop in his account of the “theoretical man” in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the 1874 “untimely meditation” on history and life. In this early essay, Nietzsche offers not merely an exposition of the Platonic dialogue, but a philosophical contribution of his own that clearly favors the orientation of Alcibiades. Developing the ideas of some recent commentators, I argue that Nietzsche’s image of the dynamic “knot” in his early interpretation of the Symposium is a key to the subtlety of his own philosophical position, which recognizes a real tension, rather than a mere opposition, between the orientation of Socrates to theory and of Alcibiades to life.