Nietzsche's "Problem of Socrates" and Plato's political psychology (Friedrich Nietzsche).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Nietzsche devotes the second section of the <italic>Twilight of the Idols </italic> to a presentation of “The Problem of Socrates,” a problem with which he struggled throughout his career. In my dissertation I argue that by coming to a better understanding of the “problem” Nietzsche uncovers in his intimate struggle with the figure of Socrates, we can shed important interpretive light on Nietzsche's and Plato's disparate philosophic projects. Broadly stated, my contention is that Plato presents his own version of Nietzsche's question concerning the relation between Socrates' “will to truth” and something like the “will to power.” In the dialogues this question takes the form of an investigation into the problematic status of the “spirited” aspect of soul (<italic>to thumoeides </italic>) in Plato's account of philosophical inquiry. Central to my thesis is the claim that Plato's <italic>Republic</italic> presents a view of ‘political psychology’ which, like Nietzsche's “physio-psychology” of the will to power, deals with the different internalized ethical narratives and justificatory schemes which inform human souls and indicates how these different internalized narratives mediate human beings' perceptions of their world. Implicit in the idea of <italic>thumos</italic> or ‘spirit’, as the locus for the distinctly political virtues, is some sense of our relative worth-a sense of how we stand in relation to an internalized, “imagined other” and, in some sense, to the whole of society. In this context, I take issue with the line of interpretation going back to Nietzsche, which contends that Plato's psychology presents, in Bernard Williams' words, a “featureless moral self.” On the contrary, I believe that those accounts in the dialogues shown to be part of Plato's analysis of <italic>to thumoeides</italic>.