In his recent book, The Art of Living (1998), Alexander Nehamas develops a generalized interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical relationship with the figure of Socrates as he presents himself through Plato's early and middle dialogues. It is Nehamas's contention that Nietzsche experienced ambivalent and somewhat unsettled attitudes towards Socrates, an ambivalence that lingers throughout his philosophical career. At its heart, the problem of Socrates is, on Nehamas's interpretation, that Socrates inspires the highest degree of both criticism and praise to which Nietzsche appears to rise in his writing, one which he reserves for either exemplary or decadent individuals. Looking out into a culture that frequently strikes him as hostile to life, strength, and the will, Nietzsche finds in Socrates an embodiment of such qualities of dialectical reasoning and of willful determination as to treat Socrates as one of the great individuals to have affected world history. And yet, at the same time, Socrates inspires in Nietzsche moments of regret, even contempt, for the hostility to life his philosophy may have helped introduce into western culture.

To more properly to describe this mixture of responses to the Socratic legacy, Nehamas introduces a picture of Nietzsche's many and sometimes varied terms of praise, one which will help explain, he believes, why it is that Nietzsche could only extend this level of praise quite rarely in his work. In this article, I shall examine the picture of exemplary or superlative life that Nehamas attributes to Nietzsche, a picture with which, he suggests, both Nietzsche and Socrates arguably matched.