Plato Nietzsche & Reading (After Co.)

DAVID FARRELL KRELL

DePaul University

Just for the record: Socrates stands so close to me that I am almost always fighting a battle with him. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1875

["However, I believe that Plato was sick"]. Plato, Phaedo 59b10

Nietzsche and Plato: a frightful confrontation. From the many discussions of Plato in Nietzsche's works-there are well over five hundred direct references-we learn that Nietzsche viewed his life's task as overcoming Platonism. And, all reservations and qualifications aside, we know that Plato had something to do with Platonism. If the history of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, if philosophy itself consists of variations on the theme of Platonism, then Nietzsche wants to write the last variation, the one that will exhaust all remaining possibilities for Platonism and bring philosophy as such to a close. It seems we can read sympathetically either Plato or Nietzsche, but not both: read Plato alone, and rest assured that Nietzsche is a dogmatist of the nastiest sort, more destructive even than Thrasymachus or Callicles; read Nietzsche alone, and rest assured that Plato is a decadent of the most contemptible sort, and a charlatan besides. Nietzsche calls him "a grand Cagliostro." Reading Plato after Nietzsche: is that possible at all?' It would not be too much to say that every indictment in the Nietzschean oeuvre of otherworldly metaphysics, morals, religion, and art directly involves Plato and Platonism. Philosophers are people who 46 want to hurry up and die, we read in Phaedo, so that they can float up to the ethereal realm of the pure ideas; to this end they despise the body and preach crusades against it, and lending death a hand, they mortify the flesh; they invent a God as anemic as themselves and invest their wretched hopes in him, dreaming heavenly dreams; even their music is lugubrious and bathetic, their dance a kind of solemn mummery. Platonic-Christian culture in its most noteworthy achievements: this is what Nietzsche scorns and derides as unable to sustain life. Yeats speaks of the tower "half dead at the top," Nietzsche of the death of God- that death a curious sui-dei-cide. In the transvaluation of all values willed by the Nietzschean overman, the Platonic tower is turned up- side down and torn inside out. For Nietzsche sees in Platonism the provenance of contemporary nihilism, the source of what we prefer to consider a strictly "modem" malaise, which some even blame on Nietzsche himself. In order to overcome passive nihilism and banish the feeble- spiritedness of Schopenhauerian pessimism or European Buddhism, Nietzsche says we must overcome the tradition that began with the collapse of Hellenism-with Plato. A number of jejune essays have been written during the past few decades, urging that we rescue ourselves from all this nihilistic unpleasantness by inculcating Platonic "values" in our youth: produce a line of Theatetuses-but no Alcibiades, if you please!-and all this modern or postmodern disease will succumb to Doric sanity. Nietzsche would answer that, apart from the difficulties inherent in living backwards, to reproduce telescopically at the time of its denouement the same play of Western culture as a play-within-a- play would simply result in an aggravated nihilism. Nietzsche's suspicion against Plato is, above all, a suspicion of the Platonic Odtpgaicov and Oepa7cF,t'a: he does not believe that heavier doses of the same drug or intensified applications of the same treatment will improve our state of health. In what follows I would at least like to try to avoid adding one more to that number of futile essays that see in Plato's works a ready antidote to nihilism. I side with Nietzsche, if thinking is a matter of taking sides, and ask again whether Plato can still be read with profit. I first read Plato when I was fifteen-a paperback selection of the dialogues in the Jowett translation, which included Symposium. An in- troductory blurb announced that the Symposium was Plato's dialogue on "love," and so, hoping for enlightenment, I began with that. I got as far as Pausanias' speech on noble and base love, which praises love of the soul and condemns love of the body. I did not throw the book away only because I had bought it with my own earnings, but I knew then and there, in the passionate and apodictic way adolescents know