You must read Plato’s Laws to properly understand Nietzsche. It is virtually impossible to make sense of most of what he says without this book, e.g., the philosopher as legislator and commander, dancing dionysus and apollo, creation of values, what is noble, will to power, agon, etc.
I say this because after years of studying both, I’ve come to the conclusion that Nietzsche is a mere character in Plato’s books. Reading Nietzsche is like listening to someone on the phone. You only get half the conversation, because you don’t know who is on the other line nor what they’re saying. Well, I’m here to tell you that Plato is on the other line, and what he says can be found in the Laws.
Large chunks of Christianity is… but you don’t have to accept the neoplatonism either, in Catholicism, or Orthodoxy… most all the ancient churches recognize the philosophy happened to be one of many present… as long as the philosophy doesn’t outright contradict Christianity, it’s good to be adapted. There are, a lot of Christian Taoists for example. I’m a Christian Stoic, not big on Platonism.
You are aware Plato’s school and it’s successors went through several major mutations, some of which were down right nihilistic, depending on who lead them… right? Nihilism can mean a lot of things… it’s mostly a bullshit theory unless your talking specifics… it’s hard to link the dispersed parts of the brain that negate things as a larger, working whole. Thats as illusionary as it gets.
The Original poster didn’t really ask a question so I don’t know where to begin. I agree with both of you though. I just wish both of you delved deeper into the abyss to come back and give something more substantive to work with, but I’ll try my best. Yes, Nietzsche believed that platonic thought clouded the minds of the masses with too much apollonian thought at the expense of the Dionysian. In other words, it was too rational. I don’t know if he actually read further into Plato because there is a storyline and plot. Socrates the Homeric hero that doesn’t conquer monster after monster, like Odysseus, but instead conquers sophist after sophist with the aid of his daimon and interlocutors, minus the Symposium, that one is unique among the rest. You never know if its a comedy or a tragedy that you are reading. It’s more of a serious joke most of the time.
To know your enemy is to know yourself, Nietzsche seemed to know his enemy very well. He had a very strage way to look at enemies too. Very strange fellow. I personally don’t have enemies, I don’t feel like that is a healthy way to live, but that’s fluff. Nietszche was a gifted Greek Philologist. So he knew the Greek dramatists and the depth psychology that came out of their masterpieces. His depth psychology is indebt to them. So if you want to know Nietzsche it might be best to know the Ancient Greeks, not just Plato.
Plato was the start of western philosophy and Nietzsche was the end. I have no concept of how any other rational connection could be made between the two.
A detailed study can virtually cause these connections. Even so, if N embodied in the flesh a character of Plato’s, where the original fiction may have only carried its general spirit, the effort is not wasted. “Fleshing out”. To N originality was an object of ridicule. One sentence that a writer pens down in one hailstorm can be worth more than the rest of his entire life. So one character of Plato can be all that was worthy about his existence. A premonition of a new lust or a first glimpse of an embryonic synthesis… an ode to the future, that is indeed what Plato is, much like any idealistic philosopher.
Aphorisms work like a conversation of which part is asked of you, the reader, to play. Plato spells out all there is to say, on some level anyway, whereas the laws that govern persuasion involve the reciprocity of law-giver and law-interpreter.
Z talks to his students and fellow men, and the responses he gets go into the turns he takes. Much like in this scene, he takes a violent turn, rather than Socrates, who has no such weight, who does not own the ruin.
It’s difficult to distinguish Socrates from Plato, but in any case, Plato’s real enemy seems to be the poets. Let me put it this way, Nietzsche says that philosophy and science have been for the longest times handmaidens to religion. The subtitle of Descartes’ Meditations, for example, is “In which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated.” It has this subtitle because the church sent word to philosophers to prove the existence of God and the soul without relying on scripture. Aristotle had come back to Europe, and a large portion of the intelligentsia were beginning to hold on to the idea that neither God nor the immortality of the soul could be proved. By working on behalf of church doctrine [in a philosophical way], Descartes can be said to be a philosophical laborer, a handmaiden for religion—and Nietzsche would then think that he’s not a real philosopher.)
Anyway, as N saw it, the religion ceased to be sovereign in Europe, and the new fight was over whether science or philosophy would come to rule. Whichever won, the other (including religion) would serve it in the same way that philosophy served religion. Well, science won and it gave us analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers make no secret of the fact that they’re merely clearing up the linguistic path for science.
A similar event occured in the time of Plato. The influence of religion waned. The poets and their works could no longer serve as foundations of morality. You see this in the first few pages of the Republic, in which Cephalus leaves fairly quickly. The new battle that took place was over the philosophers serving as the new foundation for ethical doctrine, or the sophists who [according to who you ask] put forth the idea that there was no foundation. If you ask Nietzsche, he’d tell you the sophists were conservative, Homer’s handmaidens. They attempted to teach virtue as the old world understood virtue, albeit through argument, and not through the revealed words of the poets (to whom the muses spoke). The poets and tragic age greece was fundamentally pessimistic about reason’s ability to provide us knowledge; hence they relied on revelation. The gods spoke through the poets, or this is what they claimed anyway, and so it’s best to consider them prophets.
Plato’s enemy, at least as N can see, is Homer. Just like Nietzsche’s enemy is Christianity. Both Plato and Nietzsche represented the side of philosophy against the sublimated but still conservative forces of religion. In the same way that N saw the sophists as attempting to conserve poetic wisdom through reason, he sees science as conserving old moralistic [Christian] wisdom through reason.
In any case, I stand by my advice in the OP.
This thread is directed towards serious Nietzscheans.
Serious Nietzscheans must of necessity be serious Platonists.
I also very highly recommend Havelock’s Preface to Plato to anyone interested in Nietzsche. If you want to know what N meant when he said that Plato’s biggest mistake was the creation of the pure mind, read this book.
If I am not mistaken, Nietzsche thought of Plato as a bore. How could Plato then be instrumental to understand N?
One is better off looking to Christianity, as a form of thought to which N resisted, one can find the footprint of the ‘savior’ all across Nietzsches opus, and even though he referred to Christianity as Platonism for the people, he was not as an aristocratophile concerned with Platos ideas.
That said, ideas from Plato may have seeped into N’s thinking without any credit being given. It may also be that the two philosophers arrived at similar insights about the state as it relates to the people, as politics really is quite a simple game, if one does not adopt the view that all views and wills are equally interesting and entitled, in which case it becomes impossibly complicated and, thus, saturated with corruption.
A personal note; I agree that an aristocracy is necessary, but I think that what has hitherto been considered ‘aristos’ is no longer of any relevance. A new power-pyramid is in the making.
I’ve read the book. Very interesting read, thanks for the reference. What is puzzling to me is that Nietzsche allready seemed to have more or less the same understanding of what Plato meant in the context of ancient Greece, before Havelock’s came with his view. And since Havelock’s view is considered a break from the until then held view that Socrates, plato, aristotle,… were a continuation of pre-Socratic philosophers and society, i’m left wondering where Nietzsche got the idea?
I’m also not quite sure what it all means in the end. I mean where do we go from there? Pure mind, or in other words, the abstraction or isolation of notions from context seems to be a necessary condition for science to even arise. That way of thinking seems completely ingrained now, so much so that we even have a hard time imagining that it could be otherwise…
I recommend taking up on his suggestion of reading Plato on poetry and Havelock’s preface to Plato (which can be found online for free). With Havelock’s thesis about the role that poetry played in pre-socratic Greece, and the radical new break that was facilitated by Socrates and Plato/by philosophy… some of Nietzsches ideas began to become a lot more clear to me.
Thanks for the suggestion. I must admit it appeals.
Right now though, I am pleased to report that, through a long investigation of N and working through the consequences (this has become my life) I now arrived back at Thales. I think we need to start all over again, where he put the stick in the ground, and draw from there.
Honestly, not much of what came after him refers as directly to the fundamental questions as the continental philosophers have asked it as his notions do.
My own ontology, which posits values as the corner stone of all beings, comes from the same simple desire that Thales seems to have had, which is to observe the world so purely as to see a fundamental substance in everything.
It is not so much concerned with man, as being in general;
with Thales I agree to a radical extent; in fact I arrived at an identical conclusion by my own (but Nietzschean) devices – that there is no difference between the living and a non living.
This part from the introduction of that preface describes a content that is, though the author does not recognize it, supremely political (dictatorial!) and very much already a demonstration of why Plato should not be read.
He is quite as bad as any modern ideocratic tyrant, and his taste are adverse to mine in an absolute sense. I think schooling without Homer is a criminal waste.
Well i don’t think the point is to agree with or like Plato, but just to understand what it is he was trying to do, why he was so against Homer and poetry… and then go back to Nietzsche with that understanding.
This is I think kindof funny in the context of Havelock’s work :
“I think schooling without Homer is a criminal waste.”
“Scholing without Homer” is not exactly to be understood as we might understand it now (as a little piece of art-schooling cut out of the curiculum). I goes a bit further, which is why Plato did what he did. You will see if you read on…
What a nasty soul Plato is!
I am reading on, a well written piece. More and more it reinforces the impression that Plato could simply not endure poetry because of the decaying instincts and the waning of the bestowing virtue that give forth such harsh but splendorous truths that bring men to build beyond themselves; to raise up out of the dust an Athens, in the old age of which a Plato can appear, a figure far to frail to remember the reasons to praise the titanic truths of the soul that Homer throws around; a figure at the very end of things.
Keenly old Nietzsche him did perceive.
Plato could not endure truth because of its beauty… because beauty is terrible.
FC - It seems a lot of people don’t realize that Plato was almost exclusively a politician. One problem is that so many read Plato first and therefore believe that it’s philosophy. I would reverse the OP’s point and suggest that Plato isn’t quite safe to read until Nietzsche has been read. However, since so much of Nietzsche is a commentary on Plato (or at least on Platonism) that Plato does elucidate much of what N writes. The safest route is to read Hume, then Nietzsche, then Plato and then Hume and Nietzsche again. Both of the latter should be read more than once, so it’s not a waste of time.
However, if you’re smart enough, it doesn’t really matter that much what order you read them in. In fact, if you can’t see Plato for what he is, you might want to try scrapbooking or woodworking as a hobby instead of philosophy. No disrespect to scrapbooking or woodworking. They just require different aptitudes.
Plato was against the poet, but ironically he is a poet. The Phaedrus is his most expressive of all. His use of allegory, metaphors, lusty imagery are all poetic devices. Not to mention there is a story and a plot behind all of them. I don’t disagree with you though. He wanted to kick the poets out, but let in the instructive ones back in. he used poetry to his own purpose too, even if he changed the language around in his quotes. Everything has a purpose in a platonic dialogue. Brilliant. Again, I agree with you. Thank you for your detail.
To know yourself, you must know your enemy. Well put, sir.
Well, if Havelock is to be believed, then the creation of writing and the ability to thereby store information affected human beings in a tremendous way. Merely writing shit down made Plato and the western world possible.
Think about the sort of effect the internet and all the other incredible technologies we’ve got today are going to have on people. I can’t wrap my head around it. Writing served as a cultural USB drive. You could offload information from your brain, and store it elsewhere for further analysis. This made conceptual thinking possible. This made the soul, the self, possible. Soon enough we’ll have actual storage devices for information directly liked to our brains. What will that do to the western soul? How can you even fathom such a thing?
People like Plato and Nietzsche wrote for people a few generations removed from them because they could trust that things would be more or less the same. I can’t possibly conceive of my future audience. I have no idea what people 200 years from now are going to be like. Hell I don’t know what people are going to be like even 40 years from now; whether they’ll even really be people. And if I can’t imagine my audience, then I can’t write. This was Nietzsche’s trick. He thought of himself as a posthumous writer because his audience had not come around yet.
I can’t do philosophy if I can’t see past my fucking nose, but that’s precisely where I’m at.
Read Zarathustra and BGE. Think about what a philosopher is and what he does for Nietzsche. Then read Plato’s Laws and you’ll see for yourself.
To answer your question directly since in the last post I was only lamenting the basic impossibility of a new genuine philosopher: will to power.
Let me put it this way. N begins his BGE by declaring Plato’s invention of the soul as the biggest error in western history. He effectively declares Plato his enemy. This isn’t new. He said the same thing when he was in his early 20s. Anyway, in the first section after the preface, he says he will be asking some questionable questions, and brings up the riddle the sphinx posed to Oedipus. What has 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs in the afternoon, and 3 in the evening. The answer is man. From this we can gather that Nietzsche’s task is to [re]define man. Plato conceived of man as pure mind bogged down by the earthy stuff, by the body.
In BGE 36, after having established his perspectivism in 34, he begins with a question, with a new experiment. “Suppose,” he says we make the experiment of posing one cause. Read BGE 32 and you’ll see N is working with three epochs in human history. Pre-moral times, moral times, and the new supra-moral time he hopes to bring about. During the moral time, he says, man began to internalize his cruelty (in GM he goes on at length about this). His sense of self began to develop. Man began to think causally. But man went from thinking non-causally to posing many causes.
In posing many causes, man also posed many THINGS that cause. That is to say, a pen causes something, the stapler causes something, the lion causes something, man causes something. For these things to cause, they need to exist. They can’t be in flux. Here we have Plato’s need for the intelligible realm. In order to make possible many causes, Plato needed to invent many things. Things that ARE, not things that become. So, you have what amounts to souls for pens and staplers and lions and people. Their being exists in another realm, and because many such things EXIST (have being), we can now talk about many things causing.
By positing one cause, Nietzsche also supposes one thing. A thing that becomes, and so he also eliminates Plato’s need for an intelligible realm.
But this is only an experiment. N does not put this forth as [T]ruth. He says this experiment has never been made. If it leads into an absurdity, then so be it. We’ll move on to another experiment–perhaps supposing that there are two causes.