"Allt detta är Platons fel!" : Nietzsches presentation av Sokrates och Platon i Tragedins födelse

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores Nietzsche’s presentation of both Socrates and Plato in his earliest work The Birth of Tragedy with no regard to personal letters or notes. It argues that Nietzsche had great knowledge of both these ancient philosophers and presents a very nuanced understanding of both of them through the picture of the dying Socrates from Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, not a caricature of any sort as has been generally argued for. The dying Socrates includes the Socrates filled with contempt for and who only negates and takes from life but also the Socrates who practices music before his suicide. By analysing Socrates and Plato in The Birth of Tragedy through the concepts of truth and lie I explore Nietzsche’s aesthetics and concepts of the dionysian and the apollonian, the difference he makes between Socrates and Plato, how Socrates functions as both a fictional character and a living person stuck in the crossroads of fiction, reality, history and literature, the beginning of his linguistic critique, how Nietzsche views myth, what humankind must do as not to fall into nihilism and how Nietzsche by criticizing and problematizing Socrates and Plato presents his own version of what truth is and brings forward art as that which has ensnared western culture in an apollonian veil and that which can help it from falling into nihilism.