Page 21 - GALIET CRUX, NUX OR LUX: Nietzsche IV

profound effects on claims about morality and the foundations of virtue.
Curiously, Nietzsche is someone who starts out as being attracted to a moral version of Platonism: he is very much attracted to Immanuel Kant. Kant is interested in the distinction between two realms, which in some ways, correspond to the Platonic divisions between becoming and being: Phenomena (experience) and Noumena (the transcendental). For Kant, like Plato, the transcendental ‘thing in itself’ (the Essence of the Forms) is outside time and space: thereby representing the ultimate reality and freedom. Schopenhauer, a very convinced Kantian, exerts the greatest initial philosophical influence on Nietzsche. Schopenhauer, like Kant, believes in the nihilism of the ego and asserts that the only way to transcend oneself is through compassion and music. Since Nietzsche is also a musician like Luther, Schopenhauer’s influence is deeply felt. In time, Nietzsche outgrows his teachers and rejects their doubling propositions by favoring the material world although he seems to write out of compassion for humankind.
Empiricism and materialism are very important in 19th century Germanthought(Darwin,Marx&Engels,Freud). Nietzsche regards himself as materialist in a very carefully defined way. Even as he thinks that the Platonic and noumenal realms of being do not exist, he doesn’t think that simply purely material knowledge will solve all our questions or concerns about moral
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