This note prepares a commentary on Nietzsche’s sentence «Sokrates wollte sterben: nicht Athen …» and engages with secondary literature on his Sokrates-Typus.
In German narrative prose, the clause «Sokrates wollte sterben» (preterite of the verb wollen plus infinitive) frames Socrates’ death as an act of resolved volition, with his will directed toward dying. The formulation presents the fact of wanting or willing to die as a settled stance.
The French rendering «Socrate voulait mourir» (imparfait of vouloir plus infinitive) instead suggests an ongoing inner state, a durative disposition “to want to die” rather than a single, sharply bounded decision: a condition of suicidality (Suizidalität) rather than a single decisive act (Entschluss). Aspectually, the imparfait places the focus on a backgrounded, continuous attitude.
Both formulations stand in contrast to Plato’s Phaedo, where the closing scene presents the cluster «ὀφείλομεν, ἀπόδοτε, μὴ ἀμελήσητε, τὸ φάρμακον ἔπιεν» for the act of drinking the hemlock. The lexical field here is that of cultic obligation and debt: “we owe” (ὀφείλομεν), “pay back / render what is owed” (ἀπόδοτε), “do not neglect” (μὴ ἀμελήσητε), combined with the description that “he drank the pharmakon” (τὸ φάρμακον ἔπιεν).
On a conjectural reading, φάρμακον (with its ambivalence “poison” / “remedy”) together with the cock owed to Asclepius (normally a thank-offering after healing in the cult of Asclepius) can be taken to encode the pattern “life as sickness, death as cure”, although this formula is not stated explicitly in Plato and remains an interpretive construction based on cultic practice and later philosophical reception.
Plato thus stages the death of Socrates within a framework of obligation: legal and moral obligation in the dialogue Crito, and a cultic debt-lexicon in the Phaedo. Nietzsche, by contrast, recasts the scene using an explicit volition-lexicon—«Sokrates wollte sterben»—which foregrounds will and decision over legal or cultic duty. The shift is from an obligation-coded description of the execution to a will-coded characterization of the death as self-willed.
Narimani, Arvid. “‘Sokrates wollte sterben’: Volition-Lexicon in Nietzsche versus Obligation-Lexicon in Plato’s Phaedo.” Mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@ArvidNarimani/116068795711318512.