It might be so, but a bit unfair actually, since every psychological approach also has a paradigm that it implicitly refers to. In this sense, all psychologies are a bit arbitrary, being perhaps a mixture of this and that — some scientism, some personal philosophy, some politics as well no doubt.

A funny thing happened to me, for instance, on the way to the theater…

It’s that not a few psychologists have tried to persuade me that the way forward for my life is to embrace liberalism.

However. They miss the one significant point — which is that throughout my life I have been treated illiberally, as a result of having got into trouble due to the place of my birth.

Consequently the only way that political liberalism could be the psychological answer for me would be if people stopped treating me illiberally.

But that is never going to work. A limitation of the paradigm that deals only with individual psychology.

—My digression is to explain that all paradigms fail at a certain point and that psychologists can over-estimate the validity of their own paradigm just because it matches with conventional views, values and ideas.

If I were a professor, or a devil, I would tell you exactly what is inside my head, as I believe I am thoroughly studied and know the answer.

But given that I am lazy, I will break it down into two simple points:

1. Both empiricism (which is something different from perception) and reason (which is something different, technically, if only slightly, from rationalism) give us sound and useful information. It seems strongly probable that what humans need after all is not “accurate” information (whatever that may be), but useful, socially and practically useful information.
2. When we talk about objective knowledge — or, as in this case “valid and accurate knowledge” we are generally highly likely to be confusing two things. What we really would like to claim, actually, is authority for our knowledge. Specifically, we want to claim authority, on the basis that our knowledge is “valid and accurate”. But, lo and behold, authority has an entirely different structure from that of “truth” — which Nietzsche wasted his whole life trying to point out.

Most of the answers here seem informed to varying degrees, but also a little weird in spirit to me.

I think it is on this matter of the spirit of engagement that Nietzsche had with the world around him where most interpretations go a bit astray.

The problem is that we have inherited a mode of evaluation where there is truth versus non-truth. This very question, “Why did Nietzsche dislike Socrates so much?” seems to imply that there were underlying, personal and moral reasons for some kind of “dislike”. But I think that comes from fundamentally a misleading paradigm that over-emphasizes the capacity of language and reason to guide us to the definitive and unbending “truth”.

Shift this contemporary Western perspective to one that pertained more to a traditional African society, for instance, and one may see a spirit of reverence that pertains even for one’s enemies. This may be an older mode of evaluation, that has not yet been afflicted with Western moral formulations such as identity politics. (I don’t want to confuse and inflame people by explaining, for instance why Cecil Rhodes was allowed to lie undisturbed in his grave for so long, but it had to do with respecting the potency of a powerful enemy. FLAME AWAY.)

Nietzsche has a similar mode of evaluation, which respects the power of someone who has achieved much, even if that person is one’s ideological enemy.

What Nietzsche didn’t like about Socrates was, as another answer says, his “democratic” mode of evaluation. But this wasn’t for the positive aspects of democracy, but rather for the diminishment of an appreciation for the inherent depth in things. Socrates seemed to shine a light everywhere, into every dark recess, and to make things that were experienced in a dark and esoteric way seem light and superficial — almost like any fool could grasp them. This might have been “liberating” in some regards, but it made things very boring, according to Nietzsche.

Who wants “eternal daylight” and not night, not dreams, no terrors? — Only those afraid of the dark, thinks Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s psychological analysis was that Socrates was indeed afraid of the dark that lurked within him. He had learned to do combat with his own inner forces by in effect putting a straitjacket on them, so that they could be controlled. Socrates willingly wore the straitjacket of “reason” and lured others into thinking it was good for them as well. But, according to Nietzsche, not everybody actually needed this extreme solution in the way that Socrates did. Only those who were scared of their own darker emotions would have the need to put it on.

For me, it was in the realization that language is not LOGOS. Therefore it does not — because indeed it cannot — contain within it any form of divine reason.

Apart from this, my source of anxiety was in knowing that I am just NOT communicating effectively. Actually, worse than this, I am communicating something, but it is exactly the opposite to what I had intended to be communicating.

This is a problem, as Nietzsche points out, with having uncommon experiences. One can only communicate was is common, or average in the range of experiences people can have. Moreover, another person will only understand you if they are more or less in the same range, having had very similar experiences themselves. Apart from that, you can forget it. Being understood as a matter of course is something you have to let go of.

And this is actually a very good thing to realize. It is important to understand that there is no God in the sky that is tasked with making sure that words mean exactly the same thing to you as they mean to other people. Even the word, “anxiety” has different connotations and levels of meaning to different people, depending on what they have been exposed to, and of course depending on their specific needs and psycho-social make-up. (And there will indeed be people who even think that I just make that last word up!)

The additional benefit that comes from understanding that language is not a thing that can be used consistently across the world (indeed, even within the English-speaking world), is that you have a much better idea, upon performing the analysis, who your people are. And you also know who they are not.

When words are interpreted in a way that do not match our inner intentions, that makes us anxious. But the anxiety is a useful sign for us, letting us know more about our implicit relationship to the social worlds around us, and telling us which of them we can or cannot trust.

As Nietzsche certainly said:

268. What, after all, is ignobleness?—Words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations. It is not sufficient to use the same words in order to understand one another: we must also employ the same words for the same kind of internal experiences, we must in the end have experiences IN COMMON. On this account the people of one nation understand one another better than those belonging to different nations, even when they use the same language; or rather, when people have lived long together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil) there ORIGINATES therefrom an entity that "understands itself"—namely, a nation. In all souls a like number of frequently recurring experiences have gained the upper hand over those occurring more rarely: about these matters people understand one another rapidly and always more rapidly—the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation; on the basis of this quick comprehension people always unite closer and closer. The greater the danger, the greater is the need of agreeing quickly and readily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand one another in danger—that is what cannot at all be dispensed with in intercourse. Also in all loves and friendships one has the experience that nothing of the kind continues when the discovery has been made that in using the same words, one of the two parties has feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears different from those of the other. (The fear of the "eternal misunderstanding": that is the good genius which so often keeps persons of different sexes from too hasty attachments, to which sense and heart prompt them—and NOT some Schopenhauerian "genius of the species"!) Whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of command—these decide as to the general order of rank of its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things. A man's estimates of value betray something of the STRUCTURE of his soul, and wherein it sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic needs. Supposing now that necessity has from all time drawn together only such men as could express similar requirements and similar experiences by similar symbols, it results on the whole that the easy COMMUNICABILITY of need, which implies ultimately the undergoing only of average and COMMON experiences, must have been the most potent of all the forces which have hitherto operated upon mankind. The more similar, the more ordinary people, have always had and are still having the advantage; the more select, more refined, more unique, and difficultly comprehensible, are liable to stand alone; they succumb to accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate themselves. One must appeal to immense opposing forces, in order to thwart this natural, all-too-natural PROGRESSUS IN SIMILE, the evolution of man to the similar, the ordinary, the average, the gregarious—to the IGNOBLE—!

Well if I told you this, I would have to kill you.

It was a good question actually, though, my fine sir. When I went to art school straight out of high school, in my late teens, I had no idea what “freedom of expression” was, so art school was wasted on me. Plus, there was something of a cultural lefty vibe, that didn’t resonate with me either, as I had come very an entirely different set of circumstances . Indeed, it may be worth saying that my previous experience of life had been much more vibrant, and much more conducive to making art, except not modern or contemporary art. Anyway, I was very out of my depth, or out of contemporary shallowness, or whatever. I couldn’t make sense of it.

This was a long time ago. The mid-eighties.

I had read Existentialism is a Humanism many times, to try to catch up with my contemporary peers in their way of looking at the world. But I was only burnt by the flame of nothingness. And still nothing made sense.

Consequently, I resorted to changing my major, and indeed my whole area of study, and indeed my university. I had noticed that I was more interested in the theoretical justifications that people gave for their work in the so called “art crit” sessions, rather than in works they were making.

So I went to a more prestigious university and studied the humanities, including critical theory and philosophy (eg. critical thinking) and I improved my grasp on the contemporary world.

But it was still about fifty percent unsatisfying. So I made a turn back to Africa again. I couldn’t afford to fly there or to live there, so I made a conceptual turn. What I tried to do was to combine the philosophies that I felt had life in them with the African literature that I thought had life in it. I attempted to unify Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera (the Zimbabwean writer) under the conceptual heading of “intellectual shamanism”. I also purloined “object relations psychology” from the school of psychoanalysis, to fulfil my task. (I changed the latter very much in the process, in line with Nietzsche’s spirit, so that it became no longer a moral philosophy, but a lens though which we could see “the shamanic perspective”.)

I wasn’t able to explain this very well, at the time, in terms of my PhD, so I decided I had to kind of enter, subjectively, the very structure that I had built, in order to experience it myself “shamanically”.

And then I did so.

This part is more complex to explain, so I will skip over it. How I entered the conceptual system of my own creation is probably not relevant to most people. (Or, “if I told you, I should probably kill you, just to fulfil my responsibility.)

I found absolutely a network of strong tensions, with traumatic threats at every turn. It was a nightmare, ongoing. I had very vivid nightmares of extremely violent scenes every night. I went back into my African past, and examined it from every angle. I was even able to experience, subjectively things I had only had intellectual questions about before. I experienced every single thing that I had ever had any intellectual curiosity about, as if it were directly happening to me (which made me rue the previous self that I had been — how could I have been so nonchalant and naive? I felt very traumatized by my own naivete, because now I was stuck in this paradigm of my own making, and couldn’t get out. )

But I did find there in this architectural structure of my own personal traumas another dimension of amazing beauty, that I couldn’t quite leave, either. It was too magnetizing in its elegance. I think what I saw was raw Nature, without any civilizing interpretations. And so I began to paint it.

And what did I find about “freedom of expression”? Only that one expresses oneself most “freely” when one enters a state of absolute bondage. At least, in the sense that primeval beauty is impossible to see if one is in a state of “civilization” or embraces “civilized values”. Then, one cannot see it at all. And “freedom” is the ultimate value embraced by bourgeois civilization. At least, I think it is. When I embraced those values, I could not create art at all.