Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity

7 Nietzsche’s Politeia, I

7 nietzsche’s politeia, i The mature Nietzsche was never quite sure about Plato. About Platonism, yes: a catastrophic idealism based on two great falsehoods, the pure mind and the good in itself (BGE Preface)—catastrophic because it undermined the glorious civilization of classical antiquity. But Plato himself, ‘‘the most beautiful growth of antiquity,’’ remained elusive. At times Nietzsche seems to absolve Plato of any sincere Platonism—for example, in book 5 of The Gay Science, where the invention of Platonism is attributed to prudence, or to fear on behalf of others (372). According to this account, Plato was not himself a vengeful idealist. Though gravely mistaken in doing what he did, he wished only to provide new warrant for morality in an era that was suffering its own death of gods. At other times Nietzsche looks at Plato with a less charitable eye, ascribing something of the -ism to the man. Yet even when he takes this view, as he does in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche pointedly does not convict Plato of the weakness or vengefulness of the typical idealist. At worst Plato was seduced by the desire ‘‘to prove to himself that reason and instinct of themselves tend toward one goal, the good, ‘God’’’ (191), a seduction to which he was rendered vulnerable less from vengefulness or weakness than from innocence. Indeed, Plato’s innocence was the innocence of nobility in the face of plebeian (read: Socratic) cleverness; and as for power, his was ‘‘the greatest strength any philosopher so far has had at his disposal’’ (ibid.). In the end—perhaps because Nietzsche met his end so early and unexpectedly—we are left with a Nietzsche who is not quite certain which Plato to believe in.1 1. There are some grounds for concluding that the more exculpatory view was Nietzsche’s final view, for the works in which it finds expression, most notably book 5 of The Gay Science (quoted above) and Twilight of the Idols, came after Beyond Good and Evil, if only by a short while. Lampert supports this view in Nietzsche’s Task, pp. 160–61, though in his earlier work, Nietzsche’s Teaching, p. 269, he makes the case that ‘‘Nietzsche the philologist was not deflected into the perhaps interminable philological inquiry into what Plato really believed.’’ The reason I stop short of embracing the view that Nietzsche finally settled on the more exculpatory position and hold instead with the claim that Nietzsche never settled the question is that he seems to reiterate the more severe judgment of Beyond Good and Evil in the Genealogy of Morals, which appeared later than book 5 of The Gay Science (though not later than Twilight); see GM III 25, 204 nietzsche’s new eternity But however tantalizing the question of Nietzsche’s Plato—and it only becomes more tantalizing as we come to see the extent to which Nietzsche means to rival and contend with Plato—it is less important than a question that Nietzsche did settle. Whatever his uncertainty about what precisely Plato was, Nietzsche did claim to know what Plato did, what Plato undertook to do. (And therewith, given the world-historic scale of Plato’s task and the nobility with which he undertook it, Nietzsche also claimed some certain knowledge about Plato himself, namely, his extraordinary strength and ‘‘monstrous’’ pride [GS 351]. Not everything about such a soul could remain mysterious.) This knowledge is more important because, as an exercise in ‘‘monumental history,’’ it showed Nietzsche what a powerful thinker could do (UD 2). Plato’s task, as Nietzsche had begun to understand it as early as the writing of Daybreak, had been nothing less than to create and rule over a civilization. Plato aimed to become ‘‘the lawgiver of new customs;’’ he intended ‘‘to take in hand the direction of mankind’’ (Daybreak 496; also see WP 141). And he succeeded (BGE Preface). Plato’s legislating was the task of a lifetime, accomplished by means of dozens of writings and the establishment of an Academy. An account of the task, though—a laying out of its grounds and an intimation of its means and ends—is largely available in a single writing, the Republic. If Plato was the one who put all philosophy and theology on the same track (BGE 191), and therewith all culture and hence all politics (for the political is shaped by the horizon formed by philosophy and theology),2 it is in the Republic that he shows...