Life or Anti-Life: Nietzsche vs Socrates
             Nietzsche's charge that Socrates is anti-life appears to be driven merely by disgust and not proven by fact. I say this mainly because the majority of Nietzsche's accusations in "The Problem of Socrates" were either negative statements against Socrates physical appearance or inaccurate accounts that he possibly just misunderstood. Therefore, with Nietzsche's invalid charges we can not consider Socrates anti-life.
             One of Nietzsche's first mistakes is in his opening paragraph of "The Problem of Socrates". Nietzsche starts out by intentionally placing a label on the wisest sages by claiming that "the wisest sages of all times have reached the same judgment about life: it's worthless. . . Always and everywhere we have heard the same sound coming from their mouths-a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of fatigue with life, full of hostility to life" (p. 12). This is a false and inadequate statement about the wisest sages or at least the, wise sage, Socrates. In Plato's Apology Socrates was not full of melancholy instead he was filled up with justification. Socrates tried to think of his sentence in a more positive aspect by thinking that death wouldn't be so bad. Socrates thought of the many ways he could spend his time with other men who died also from unjust convictions. He was very pleased at the thought that he would be able to test and examine people even in death as he would in Athens. Socrates especially thought it would be of "extraordinary happiness" to examine Troy, Odysseus or any other men who were considered to be great. Here is a man who has based his whole life on examining people and their actions. For this reason alone the Athenians have considered him as being corruptive. Why would Socrates not be happy of going to a place where he could further his analysis on t...