Page 18 - GALIET CRUX, NUX OR LUX: Nietzsche IV

The Dionysian and Apollonian will can be seen in many lights. According to Nietzsche, Plato, like most philosophers, tends to slice the world between a world of being and a world of becoming. Think of Buddha. In Plato’s Republic, for example, he divides into degrees the different realms of knowledge: The Forms as we know them through their intelligibility. As Plato says, we do not gain knowledge by sensory experience or empiricism; rather, we gain knowledge by pointing the self towards the light and illumination or intellective seeing, noesis.17 As a result, the true and eternal Forms provide the model for the world of becoming. In Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, he criticizes Plato,
“...in order for the platonic dialogue 3⁄4 this repulsively self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic 3⁄4 to exert its charge one must have never read a good French author... Plato is boring. Ultimately, by mistrust... I find him so divergent from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so over moralized, such a Christian before his time. He already takes the concept of Good to be the highest concept that in regards to the whole Plato phenomena, I would rather use the harsh expression “exulted swindle” or, if it sounds a little bit better, idealistic...”18
Nietzsche’s ressentiment towards Plato’s idealism is repulsive. He characterizes him in this book as being the founder of
17 Plato. Complete Works. Republic. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing,
1997. Book VI the Republic, 509d-513e
18 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols & the Anti-Christ. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
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