I wrote this essay in 2015 for an undergrad course on Pre-Socratic and Greek philosophy. My professor liked to bring Nietzsche in as a foil to Plato in order to clarify the latter's ideas. Being obsessed with Nietzsche I used it as an opportunity to highlight what I take to be their unexpected areas of overlap despite all Nietzsche's rhetorical pretensions to the opposite and the subsequent literature that has taken Nietzsche at his word. While my thinking on this subject has not significantly changed since writing this I would likely frame it slightly differently and rework some things. This was, after all, merely an undergrad paper and I was already pushing the limits of the prompt.
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My philosophy, inverted Platonism: the further away from what truly is, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is. Life in semblance as the goal - Nietzsche
Nietzsche contra Plato: On The Creation of the Philosopher-King
On the surface, Nietzsche and Plato appear to be almost diametrically opposed on every point, with Nietzsche positioning himself as the adversary of Platonism and its subsequent manifestation in Christianity as “Platonism for ‘the people.’”i A deeper reading, however, reveals that the two – despite their differences with regards to the emphasis placed on reason, truth, language, the forms, and the functions thereof – share an underlying alliance, skewed only by a subtle difference lying in their respective strategies to one and the same project, namely, the cultivation and creation of a type of philosopher-artist-king. In what follows, I will first contrast Plato and Nietzsche on their conceptions of the role of reason for humanity, the value of truth, the nature of language and the metaphysical status of the forms. I will then examine the ways in which these strategic differences camouflage a fundamental alliance between Nietzsche and Plato as “genuine philosophers”ii with a shared artistic and political elitism and interest in cultivating a type capable of determining “the Whither and For What of man.”iii
I.
For Plato, the role of reason or the intellect is to intuit, by way of logical and dialectical argumentation, the ultimately real, true, archetypal Forms, of which particular, empirical objects are derivative copies. In other words, there is an assumption on Plato's part that the universe is a cosmos, or rationally ordered whole that can be understood through the use of human reason and language, or what Plato calls the unchanging, eternal Intelligible World, as opposed to the empirical world of appearances and change. It follows, therefore, that for Plato, language is not merely the use of conventional meanings of words, but words themselves denote and name an objective thing-in-itself that expresses itself or manifests as any number of the eternal Forms, despite the fact that the objects encountered in the physical world remain changing, imperfect copies of these Forms, and are therefore, not fully real. The imperfection found in empirical examples, however, is what leads Plato to the most straightforward argument in favor of the reality of the Forms; that is, if, for example, we take two sticks and measure them side by side, we will undoubtedly find that they are of unequal lengths. But to make this judgment is to invoke the Form of 'equality', for how else could we determine that the sticks are unequal?iv Knowledge of the Forms, therefore, is attained prior to experience in the physical world, yet becoming-embodied, our souls forget this knowledge and so therefore must engage in philosophy, self-examination and ‘knowing thyself,’ which is the process of remembering the archetypal Forms with which one's soul previously cohabited.v
The highest Form, for Plato, is the Good, which, as the source of all the Forms, illuminates and expresses itself throughout the entire natural world, for all living things strive for what is good or best for them and their functional role within the cosmos.vi Of course, one can be wrong about what is good for them – for example, a human endowed with reason believing that the Good is merely physical pleasure and the constant gratification of desire – for the capacity of the human soul to reason is the highest of the four “affections of the soul,” with understanding as second, belief in third, and conjecture as the lowest.vii Hence, we come to the fundamental value placed on Truth in Plato's philosophy. For Truth is that after which the philosopher constantly strives,viii regardless the fact it will never be fully attained in physical, embodied existence, as Socrates describes philosophy as the study and practice of the release of the soul from the body, i.e., death.ix Yet, through dialectical argumentation, self-discipline, asceticism and recollection, we can get closer to this purified state of knowledge of the Forms while living, discovering that, knowledge of the what is Good for a thing is intricately tied to knowing the Truth of the matter; for the basis of Truth is the Forms, which in turn, are based in the highest Form of the Good. There is, therefore, a hierarchical and prescriptive element involved throughout Plato, in that moral principles are objectively true by way of their relationship to the objective Form of the Good. The role of the philosopher, then, is to distill the true, objective essence of this Form as it manifests or imbues all of life; as for example, one would do in looking for the essential nature of 'piety' in the manifold conceptions and actions called 'pious.' For all actions called 'pious' must share some underlying similarity which makes the designation correct, and, therefore, the job of the philosopher is to get as conceptually close to the essential Form of piety as possible. This, again, highlights Plato's emphasis on language in its ability to correctly name a phenomenon, and our ability to apply these names in an objective fashion, designating discrete unchanging elements and phenomena amidst the empirical world of change and appearance. Words, for Plato, pierce the veil of appearance and refer to the ultimately real archetypal Forms of the Ideal, or Intelligible World.
Plato's philosophy comes into view as a systematic strategy to cultivating a philosopher-king most clearly in The Republic, wherein each of the previously mentioned elements come into play in developing the archetypal statesmen or philosopher-king, who, while of the warrior class, is well-tempered, disciplined, the most noble and virtuous in deed, and necessarily seeks the clearest conception of the Good, without which the possession of knowledge, in general, is useless. As Socrates asks rhetorically, “Do you suppose there is any gain in possessing everything in the world without possessing the good? Or to understand everything in the world except the good?”x For such a philosopher-king must be able to discern the best course of action for the polis, and to know what is best for a thing is equivalent to truly knowing it, for a things essential nature is intricately linked to its function within the whole. Consequently, the philosopher-king maintains with Socrates that “the greatest task is to learn the perfect model of the good, the use of which makes all just things and other such become useful and helpful.”xi Or as Nietzsche calls it, “the really royal calling of the philosopher.”xii
II.
Nietzsche's inversion of Platonism begins with language and abstraction in general, yet his philosophy quickly becomes as interwoven as Plato's own, as the value and function of reason, truth and the metaphysical status of the Forms are immediately turned on their head. For Nietzsche, the value and function of reason and language is “not 'to know' but to schematize—to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require.”xiii In other words, all concepts originate from equating what is in reality unequal, for the sole purpose of communicating human biological needs and making a minimal sense of the world.xiv Nietzsche makes this argument with the example of a leaf, no two of which are ever fully equal, yet through an “arbitrary abstraction” and “forgetting” of the unique differences, we obtain the idea of ‘Leaf’ as something separate, reified into an object of its own, “some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form.”xv Here, Nietzsche is making an explicit reference to Plato’s Forms and one immediately sees the inversion with regard to forgetting and recollection. While for Plato, it is a matter of remembering to the time when one’s soul mingled with the original Forms, e.g., the archetypal ‘Leaf,’ in a revelationary experience of recollection; for Nietzsche, on the other hand, it is only by forgetting the primary, unequal and particular experience that we construct and abstract to the Form, which is itself merely a metaphorical translation of nerve stimuli. As Nietzsche explains it:
The different languages, set side by side, show that what matters with words is never the truth, never an adequate expression; else there would not be so many languages … One designates only the relations of things to man, and to express them one calls on the boldest metaphors. A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor.xvi
In other words, what matters to Nietzsche is not the truth, but lying and dissimulation that works and is not recognized as such, for “man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived … So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free.”xvii That is, Nietzsche is not simply referring to lying in the traditional sense of “cheating,” “flattery,” “posing” or “acting a role before others,”xviii but also unconscious lying to oneself and others, as Nietzsche argues,
It is in the nature of thinking that it thinks of and invents the unconditioned as an adjunct to the conditioned … such fundamental fictions as 'the unconditional,' 'ends and means,' 'things,' 'substances,' logical laws, numbers and forms. There could be nothing that could be called knowledge if thought did not first re-form the world in this way into 'things,' into what is self-identical. Only because there is thought is there untruth.xix [emphasis added]
Consequently, to tell the truth, to communicate, is to lie according to a herd-like convention self-imposed by all, through the mutual agreement to refrain from harming one another in an otherwise Hobbesian ‘state of nature’, or “war of all against all”.xx In this sense, then, truth, reason, language, and the Platonic Forms become recognized as entirely illusory expedients to not only human survival, but also human flourishing and overpowering of itself and nature through the imposition of similarity, thinghood, forms, the use and misuse of conventional meaning to deceive others, etc.xxi
III.
At this point it remains unclear how Nietzsche and Plato share a similar goal, with their conceptions of reason, language and truth clearly running at odds. However, if we shift our focus slightly to the hints Nietzsche drops throughout his writings, an underlying resemblance becomes visible.xxii The first hint comes with Nietzsche’s notion of Christianity as “Platonism for ‘the people’”, which Nietzsche arguably also understands in the reverse, that is, that Platonism is Christianity for the elite or intellectuals.xxiii In other words, what Nietzsche attacks most vehemently in Plato is that which Christianity has subsequently adopted – e.g., the unreality of this world in favor of an ideal world after death, the equality and immortality of the souls, etc. – as a distorted Platonism, born out of slave morality and resentment, stripped of its original elitism and implications for the cultivation of a warrior caste. Thus, in implying Platonism is Christianity for the elite, Nietzsche leaves open a space for alliance, as they share an interest in cultivating and refining this elite warrior class. For neither are fundamentally concerned “with ‘saving’ or ‘freeing’ people, but rather [with] what type of man should be selected as higher, willed, and above all bred.”xxiv Furthermore, as Michael Allen Gillespie explains, we must take into account Nietzsche and Plato’s respective audiences when contrasting the strategies and conceptions the two deploy: “In a world dominated by war and warriors, in pursuit of empire and tyranny, Plato sought to soften and civilize warriors … His goal was not to turn them into pacifists but into dependable citizens.”xxv Nietzsche, on the other hand, speaking to a “Christian Europe dominated by producers and consumers who dream of eternal peace and believe in the innate dignity of man and the value of work,”xxvi found the need to revitalize the warrior passions “in order to produce the higher humanity he believes is crucial to prevent the degeneration of humanity into a herd of petty consumers.”xxvii Thus, in contextualizing their argumentative strategies we see that both, as philosopher-artists themselves, have a similar masterwork in mind, namely, what Nietzsche calls “great politics”xxviii and the cultivation of politicians capable of ruling in the “grand style.”xxix As Laurence Lampert notes, when Nietzsche claims that, “genuine philosophers … are commanders and legislators,” as contrasted with “philosophical laborers” à la Kant, “commanders and legislators must be understood here in its full Platonic pedigree as philosophical rulers who legislate for a whole age.”xxx Nietzsche’s description continues, “[T]hey say, ‘Thus it shall be!’ … With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power.”xxxi As Lampert clarifies further, it is not that the philosopher-artist makes all of nature susceptible to his/her will,xxxii rather they “legislate the values human beings live by, the values that horizon and house whole peoples and ultimately the people humanity.”xxxiii
Nietzsche also makes many indications that Plato was himself this archetypal philosopher-artist-legislator by demonstrating the order of rank of his soul in approaching the highest problems,xxxiv becoming one “who determines values and directs the will of millennia by giving direction to the highest natures.”xxxv This is another way of saying that Nietzsche respected Plato as a supreme liar and manipulator of conventional meaning, especially in terms of being an educator, i.e., one who “never says what he himself thinks, but always only what he thinks of a thing in relation to the requirements of those he educates.”xxxvi Nietzsche goes on to claim that Plato may have, in fact, been a skeptic with regard to all “inherited concepts” as is fitting of any true philosopher, yet naturally, “he taught the reverse.”xxxvii Why would he teach the reverse? As Geoff Waite speculates, “Plausibly, because Plato had some hidden agenda in mind that neither he nor Nietzsche is going to state publicly … Plausibly, it has something to do with a shared elitism with regard to politics.”xxxviii Yet, Plato fails to live up to Nietzsche’s standard, in that, given Plato’s dangerous situation as a legislator of the future, he had to deliberately blindfold himself as he walked the narrow ledge above the abyss, “when he convinced himself that the 'good' as he desired it was not the good of Plato but the 'good in itself,' the eternal treasure that some man, named Plato, had chanced to discover on his way!”xxxix In other words, Plato could not accept his creation as his own work, or himself as an artist. But as Nietzsche understands it, this is merely more proof that Plato was, in fact, an artist:
An artist cannot endure reality, he looks he away from it, back: he seriously believes that the value of a thing resides in that shadowy residue one derives from colors, form, sound, ideas, he believes that the more subtilized, attenuated, transient a thing or a man is, the more valuable he becomes; the less real, the more valuable. This is Platonism, which, however, involved yet another bold reversal: Plato measured the degree of reality by the degree of value and said: The more 'Idea,' the more being. He reversed the concept 'reality' and said: 'What you take for real is an error, and the nearer we approach the 'Idea,' the nearer we approach 'truth’— Is this understood? It was the greatest of rebaptisms; and because it has been adopted by Christianity we do not recognize how astonishing it is. Fundamentally, Plato, as the artist he was, preferred appearance to being! Lie and convention to truth! The unreal to the actual! But he was so convinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the attributes 'being,' 'causality' and 'goodness,' and 'truth,' in short everything men value.xl
Nietzsche here portrays Plato as already an inversion of his own philosophy, suggesting that Plato is an artist and legislator, dissimulator and commander, who willed his creation into the future and influenced values for millennia through the distortion and creation of unconventional meanings. Nietzsche, on the other hand, as dictated by his historical context, or “destiny” as he would call it, recognizes himself as a “new philosopher”, i.e., one who teaches the opposite of assimilation and equalization: “we teach estrangement in every sense, we open up gulfs such as have never existed before, we desire that man should become more evil than he has ever been before.”xli This is because “Plato’s invention of the pure spirit and the good as such,” while at one time “the most beautiful growth of antiquity,”xlii has become degenerate and was corrupted not only by Socrates, initially, but has come to be corrupted and perverted by Christianity as well. Thus, Nietzsche found himself necessarily against the prevailing Christian/Platonic attitudes and judgments of his time, shedding the mask of the “dogmatists’ philosophy”xliii that Platonism was for Europe for millennia. “[T]he fight against Plato” Nietzsche explains, “has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals.”xliv One of these goals is the creation of the philosopher-legislator of the future, “a stranger to reality; half an artist, half a bird and metaphysician; with no care for reality, except now and then to acknowledge it in the manner of a good dancer with the tips of one’s toes; always tickled by some sunray of happiness.”xlv
In attempting to assess which of the two strategies or conceptual frameworks is more plausible or functional, that of Plato or that of Nietzsche, it quickly becomes difficult to take seriously Plato’s faith in language and the Forms, or “the good as such,” or that such an ideal philosopher-king is possible and or desirable. This is partly because Plato’s arguments take for granted that language and reason are divine and truth-yielding, unconditioned by generations of biological evolution and need; whereas Nietzsche’s realism on the development of language is much more convincing. Nietzsche, however, does not fair any better in terms of explicating how such a philosopher-artist-legislator is to be cultivated, satisfied with spending more time describing him/her, presumably leaving it up to fate and destiny to bring it about. And for some, Nietzsche’s ideal may appear even less desirable than Plato’s, with his insistence on making humanity yet more evil. If Platonism is like stepping out of the cave into the light, in a naïve pursuit of the truth and the betterment of humanity, then Nietzscheanism is like descending from the cavernous mountain into the abysmal jungle, illuminated only by the brief flickers of light that come through the gaps in the foliage as one desperately and pessimistically hacks out a path to survive, all the while remaining “exuberant and encouraged even by misery.”xlvi For Nietzsche gives little comfort in putting the burden of value creation on the would-be philosopher-king, where any kind of regress to old values and postures is seen as weakness and farcical at this point. Nonetheless, it is Nietzsche’s understanding of language, reason and morality which rings more true today, perhaps because now more than ever, we believe without even knowing it, the new ‘noble lies’ that have trickled down from Nietzsche’s writings and influence over the last 100 years into everyday life. Take, for example, the range of mis/interpretations of the now-not-so-radical “God is Dead,” to the encouraging “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” to the relativistic “You have your way, I have my way,” to the progressive “Youths should value thinking differently.”xlvii In other words, it is nearly impossible to not detect in almost all popular culture, and even unpopular culture for that matter, at least a kind of ‘soft’ Nietzscheanism that has unwittingly incorporated any number of sound-bite sized thoughts and dictums, that, even if they did not originate with Nietzsche per se, are siphoned through a Nietzschean channel and traced back to him.xlviii Nietzsche did not, of course, invent these modes of being or rhetorical attitudes, yet as “every name in history”xlix Nietzsche amplified and accentuated these voices among the noise and gave them new masks. Thus, that Nietzsche’s account appears more plausible at this point in time can only be taken as a proof that his influence had the success and impact that he expected it would.l For the Nietzschean insight is that the ‘plausibility’ of a theory is of little import, because if it seems reasonable it simply indicates that it is an effective and working lie that we have not yet recognized as such. Consequently, it may still be a long time until we are able to “lose” Nietzsche,li his re/valuations and recognize his dissimulations as such, at which point, perhaps, the philosophers of the future will yet again find the need to reevaluate our worn-out and withered values and beliefs and attempt to point humanity in another direction.
i Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print. Preface.
ii Ibid. Sec. 211.
iii Ibid.
iv Plato. The Great Dialogues of Plato. Phaedo. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse. Ed. E.H. Warmington and Philip G. Rouse. New York: Mentor, 1956. Print. p 478.
v Ibid. Phaedo. p 480.
vi Ibid. The Republic. p 304.
vii Ibid. p. 311.
viii Ibid. p. 283. “So the real lover of learning must reach after all truth with all his might from youth upwards.”
ix Ibid. Phaedo. p 470.
x Ibid. p. 303.
xi Ibid.
xii Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1967. Print. Sec. 977. “To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy.” as quoted from Acluin.
xiii Ibid. Sec. 515.
xiv Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in Extra-Moral Sense. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Nietzsche/Truth_and_Lie_in_an_Extra-Moral_Sense.htm
xv Ibid.
xvi Ibid.
xvii Ibid.
xviii Ibid.
xix Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Sec. 573.
xx Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in Extra-Moral Sense. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Nietzsche/Truth_and_Lie_in_an_Extra-Moral_Sense.htm
xxi Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Sec. 13. “Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power --: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this.”
xxii A resemblance, no doubt, imposed at the expense of excluding numerous other differing characteristics.
xxiii Gillespie, Michael A. "Ch. 2 Toward a New Aristocracy: Nietzsche Contra Plato on the Role of a Warrior Elite." Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future. Ed. Jeffrey A. Metzger. London: Continuum, 2009. Print. p 33.
xxiv Nietzsche, Friedrich, “NF, November 1887—März 1888”; KGW 8/2:433. Pulled from, Waite, Geoff. Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, Or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Print. p 295.
xxv Gillespie, Michael A. "Ch. 2 Toward a New Aristocracy: Nietzsche Contra Plato on the Role of a Warrior Elite." Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future. Ed. Jeffrey A. Metzger. London: Continuum, 2009. Print. p 34.
xxvi Ibid. p 35.
xxvii Ibid.
xxviii Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Sec. 978. “The new philosopher can arise only in conjunction with a ruling caste, as its highest spiritualization. Great politics, rule over the earth, are at hand; complete lack of the principles that are needed.”
xxix Ibid. Sec. 962. “A great man—a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style—what is he?”
xxx Lampert, Laurence. Nietzsche's Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Print. p 199.
xxxi Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Sec. 211.
xxxii Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Print. “To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense.” Sec. 335.
xxxiii Lampert, Laurence. Nietzsche's Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Print. p 199.
xxxiv Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Sec. 213. “[T]here is an order of rank among states of the soul, and order of rank of problems accords with this. The highest problems repulse everyone mercilessly who dares approach them without being predestined for their solution by the height and power of his spirituality.”
xxxv Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Sec. 999.
xxxvi Ibid. Sec. 980.
xxxvii Ibid. Sec. 409.
xxxviii Waite, Geoff. Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, Or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Print. p 23.
xxxix Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Sec. 972.
xl Ibid. Sec. 572.
xli Ibid. Sec. 988
xlii Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Preface.
xliii Ibid.
xliv Ibid.
xlv Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Sec. 1039.
xlvi Ibid.
xlvii This is to paraphrase the famous, “the surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
xlviii I owe this “conspiratorial hypothesis” and reading of Nietzscheanism to Geoff Waite’s Nietzsche’s Corps/e. p. 1.
xlix Nietzsche, Friedrich. “What is disconcerting and strains my modesty is that I am fundamentally every name in history” From, Waite, Geoff. "Ch. 4 Nietzsche--Rhetoric--Nihilism: "Every Name in History" -- "Every Style" -- "Everything Permitted" (A Political Philology of the Last Letter)." Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future. Ed. Jeffrey A. Metzger. London: Continuum, 2009. Print. p 64.
l Nietzsche to Malwida von Meysenbug; KGB 3/1:490. “I have things on my conscience that are a hundred times heavier to carry than la bêtise humaine. It is possible that I am a destiny [or disaster: Verhängnis] for all future humanity, the destiny or disaster – and consequently it is very possible that I will one day become silent out of love for humanity!” From Waite, Geoff. Nietzsche’s Corps/e. p. 209.
li Nietzsche to Georg Brandes, Turin, January 4, 1889: “To my dear friend Georg! After you discovered me, it was no great feat to find me. The problem now is how to lose me … -- The Crucified”. http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/correspondence/eng/nlett-1889.htm
