Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism: Tragedy & Metaphysics
Criticism of Platonism
The Tragedy
In “The Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche describes a new conception of reality where life is pierced by tragedy. The phenomenon of tragedy represents the true nature of reality, showing how the individualized self emerges from the depths of life and dissolves in death. Tragedy expresses the continuous cycle of world construction and destruction. Nietzsche identifies two aesthetic forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, that are perpetually in combat, yet cannot exist without each other.
Apollo and Dionysus
The Apollonian and Dionysian were fundamental aesthetic instincts for the Hellenes. Apollo symbolizes the figurative instinct, representing the god of light, measure, and form. Dionysus is the god of chaos and the formless, associated with night and sexual frenzy. Tragedy, as a cosmic principle, is the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus, and provides the key to understanding the world. Nietzsche gives life the name of Dionysus.
Heraclitus and Socrates
Nietzsche’s tragic vision of life, influenced by Heraclitus, posits that there is only becoming; there is no being beyond space and time. The only existing world is a living, mobile entity whose ontological principle is the will to power. The phenomenon opposed to this tragic vision is the Socratic one. Nietzsche sees Socrates as a frustrated Greek who instinctively developed inner spiritual and logical-rational factors. With Socratic rationality, the chance to capture life is lost, marking the beginning of the decline of Greek culture and the fall of true philosophy. Plato furthered the destruction of the intuitive and the Dionysian by including moralism in philosophy, imposing the equation: Reason = Virtue = Happiness. Nietzsche’s critique of Plato is the start of a tradition.
The Reversal of Metaphysics
Man invents the fiction of metaphysics, a world beyond this one, to escape the forfeiture imposed by death and to give meaning to finite existence. Nietzsche believes that the fundamental error of metaphysics has been the duplication of existence: the real world (essence) and the inauthentic world (phenomenon). Our temporary, spatial world is excluded from genuine reality. Human intellect, the source of unhappiness, serves to keep humans in existence. Man determines what will henceforth be considered true. The lie of the mind is the belief that life is captured through concepts. Truth is replaced by the will to truth. Nietzsche contrasts this conceptual man with the intuitive man, who understands life better than a scientist. Nietzsche discovers the truth of evolution through intuition, while the truth of being is conceptual. Thus, he inverts metaphysics.
He proposes that we should proceed from metaphysical reality, i.e., the sensitive and mobile. However, he lacks the language to express the evolution of life, resorting to aphorisms and metaphors. Nietzsche’s proposal centers on the idea that the ontology given so far is merely an invention of philosophers. The lie about the existence of a real world and the consideration of the earthly world as mere appearance must be removed. All that exists is the becoming of many things in the underworld. Nietzsche’s thought is a thorough and devastating critique of the old foundations of traditional European culture.