Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism and Metaphysics
Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism
Nietzsche criticizes Platonism: In The Birth of Tragedy, we see the first new conception describing naturality. Life, through tragedy, is something traversed by the tragic phenomena, the true nature of reality. The Greek tragedy shows the individual’s birth and death (eternal return). Tragedy expresses the construction and destruction, the perpetual becoming of life. It’s a tragic vision where naturality, life and death, birth and decadence are intertwined. The science of life is saved through art and intuition, especially through lyric poetry. Art and lyric poetry are its first manifestations.
Greek tragedy presents two aesthetic forces that cannot exist without each other and live in perpetual combat: Apollo and Dionysus.
Apollo and Dionysus
Apollonian and Dionysian are primary aesthetic instincts. The Apollonian instinct symbolizes clarity, figuration, light, measure, and the principle of individuation. The Dionysian is given by the chaotic and immeasurable, by the fervent waves of life, by the night, and, in contrast to Apollo who loves figures, it is the god of music. It is the tragic cosmic principle, the dislocation of the effect of Apollo and Dionysus. Nietzsche gives the name of Dionysus to this vital principle. For Nietzsche, Apollo is a moment of present Dionysian “will,” “will to overcome.”
Heraclitus and Socrates
Nietzsche’s tragic vision of life comes from Heraclitus. Only becoming exists; there is no being beyond space and time, which would be an ontological starting point. The phenomenon opposed to the tragic vision is the Socratic world. Nietzsche sees in Socrates’ insecurity a lack of instinct. He had to develop rational, logical, spiritual interiority. For Nietzsche, this means intellectual rationality is incapable of seeing life flowing behind all figures.
Nietzsche takes up intuition from this deep, dark background of the decadence of Greek culture. The intuitive destruction of the Dionysian, including Plato, will give philosophy moralism. He is the initiator of a moral interpretation of being, imposing reason, virtue, and happiness, a counterpart to happiness as a concept of instinctual life in ascending plenitude. Nietzsche’s criticism of Plato extends to Plato’s history, to the tradition he began.
Metaphysics: The Inversion
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche defines metaphysics as the science that deals with the fundamental errors of humanity, as if they were fundamental truths. Metaphysics invents a fiction to escape forfeiture. For Nietzsche, the fundamental error of metaphysics is the duplication of being, as if there were a real being beyond this located world. Our spatial-temporal world is excluded from authentic naturality. For the author, “human intellect” is the resource of the most unfortunate beings. To live in society and make war, one needs to determine what “truth” is from that moment on. “Lying” is about believing through concepts, also capturing life, a conceptual truth. Nietzsche opposes the intuitive, capable of establishing the domain of art over the becoming of truth through the discovery of intuition. Therefore, he reverses metaphysics from what is sensible and the fatal mobile language to express the becoming of life. Therefore, Nietzsche speaks to us with aphorisms, and the author moves in metaphors.
The ontological proposal is that existence is seen as the invention of philosophers. We must eliminate the true world as a lie and the eternal world as a mere appearance. The only thing that exists is the becoming of multiple things in the eternal world. Nietzsche’s thought is the deepest and most demolishing critic of the old foundations of traditional culture, having its origin in the Platonic ideal.