[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Topics in Ancient Philosophy
The significance of play and competition to Nietzsche's work has been widely discussed. Aichele's specific interest here is its relation to language. The fundamental deception which language brings about is the obligation of a theoretical order on the free flow of becoming. This viewpoint lies at the heart of Nietzsche's reading of Heraclitus B 52: it rights becoming over being. Nietzsche saw in the portion a Heraclitean advance from war to game and contest. Aichele notes Nietzsche's concern in the supremacy of the agon in Greek culture, including his view that dialectic and rhetoric constituted a new kind of agon. Nietzsche interpreted the agon as the culture-driven repression of natural human drives. Thus Achilles' rage is a reversion to a latent pre-cultural condition. The agon serves the function for Nietzsche of providing the means for portraying life as a non-teleological, simply an aesthetic experience.
For Nietzsche, Socratic dialectic is a new but false agon because it is no longer undirected but looks for optimistic results. Socrates abandons unconcern to ends playing the game for its own sake for the earnestness that Nietzsche proclaimed should be removed from philosophy. This causes the rich and full potential of phenomenal experience to be lost to the constrictions of structure and judgment. In other words, Socrates subordinated the artistic to the teleological, and philosophy in his hands becomes goal-directed ethical philosophy determined for human betterment. But becoming cannot be detained propositionally as it is by nature indescribable. The movement of becoming can only be detained in the form of agonal play. Play is an activity which lacks any grounding outside itself. It is an autonomous, non-moral phenomenon. The only order belonging to the world of becoming and appearances is completely artistic.
According to Nietzsche, in opposition to this tendency the Greeks erected the sober, rational, and active Apollonian belief. Nietzsche measured authenticity as a nonstop becoming................
