_Socrates._--This veering round of Greek taste in favour of dialectics is a great question. What really happened then? Socrates, the _roturier_ who was responsible for it, was thus able to triumph over a more noble taste, the taste of _the noble_:--the mob gets the upper hand along with dialectics. Previous to Socrates dialectic manners were repudiated in good society; they were regarded as indecent; the youths were Warned against them. What was the purpose of this display of reasons? Why demonstrate? Against others one could use authority. One commanded, and that sufficed. Among friends, _inter pares,_ there was tradition--_also_ a form of authority: and last but not least, one understood each other. There was no room found for dialectics. Besides, all such modes of presenting reasons were distrusted. All honest things do not carry their reasons in their hands in such fashion. It is indecent to show all the five fingers at the same time. That which can be "demonstrated" is little worth. The instinct of every party-speaker tells him that dialectics excites mistrust and carries little conviction. Nothing is more easily wiped away than the effect of a dialectician. It can only be a _last defence._ One must be in an extremity; it is necessary to have to _extort_ one's rights; otherwise one makes no use of dialectics. That is why the Jews were dialecticians, Reynard the Fox was a dialectician, and so was Socrates. As a dialectician a person has a merciless instrument in his hand: he can play the tyrant with it; he compromises when he conquers. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to demonstrate that he is not an idiot; he is made furious and helpless, while the dialectician himself remains calm and still possessed of his triumphant reasoning powers--he _paralyses_ his opponent's intellect.--The dialectician's irony is a form of mob-revenge: the ferocity of the oppressed lies in the cold knife-cuts of the syllogism.... In Plato, as in all men of excessive sensuality and wild fancies, the charm of concepts was so great, that he involuntarily honoured and deified the concept as a form of ideal. _Dialectical intoxication_: as the consciousness of being able to exercise control over one's self by means of it--as an instrument of the Will to Power. 432. _The problem of Socrates._--The two antitheses: the _tragic_ and the _Socratic_ spirits--measured according to the law of Life. To what extent is the Socratic spirit a decadent phenomenon? to what extent are robust health and power still revealed by the whole attitude of the scientific man, his dialectics, his ability, and his severity? (the health of the _plebeian_; whose malice, _esprit frondeur,_ whose astuteness, whose rascally depths, are held in check by his _cleverness_; the whole type is "ugly").