This article aims to show how the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Michael Foucault arrived at a controversial conception of philosophy and describe how each one struggled to acknowledge in different circumstances, the Delphic obligation to live the life of the philosopher. The essay Schopenhauer as Educator, published in 1874, marks the culmination of Nietzche's life. Like Nietzsche, Foucault is concerned to interrogate the figure of the philosopher. In his final lectures in the College de France, he examined the life of Socrates and Diogenes. He deplored what he called our own modern negligence of the problem the philosophical life. Where Nietzsche offers himself to his readers as a kind of philosophical prophet, Foucault offers himself as a species of philosophical dandy, a stylish historiographic fabulist.