In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

9 will to power versus eros, or a battle of eternities In trying to apprehend the basis of Nietzsche’s quarrel with Plato we are beset by the problem with which we began: a good part of Nietzsche’s opposition to Plato needs to be understood as strategic or prescriptive as opposed to philosophic or diagnostic. As we have seen, the mature Nietzsche was inclined to separate Plato a good deal from Platonism; he attributed a large part of Plato’s idealism to a well-intended even if catastrophic judgment about what was needed to ground morality and a decent politics. Yet Nietzsche was not prepared to attribute Plato’s ‘‘error’’ entirely to a political (mis)calculation. And for that matter, even insofar as strategic political considerations did guide Plato’s actions, that Plato would be guided by such considerations itself implies a deeper difference with Nietzsche: strategic political judgments, though not as deep as such pre-political matters as the character of existence, the (non)existence of the divine, the meaning of human flourishing, and so on, at least reflect such matters. So even if Nietzsche were prepared to attribute Platonism entirely to a political calculation, his abhorrence of Platonism would still testify to a deeper antagonism with Plato. The contours of this pre-political, deep-level antagonism are not hard to see. Where Plato gives us a realm of being and eternity, Nietzsche speaks of the exclusivity of becoming and the inescapability of time. Where Plato gives us a morally governed cosmos and a world that will yield to human understanding and perhaps even to human correction, Nietzsche lauds tragic or Dionysian pessimism. Where Plato sees eros as the animating core of the soul, Nietzsche discovers will to power. Each of these disagreements and much else besides is implicated in the relation of Beyond Good and Evil to the Republic. But each of these disagreements is not equally prominent or accessible. As I explained above, the two books share a political character: each addresses a number of deep themes but does so in light of an overarching question, the question of the best regime . Each treats that question, moreover, as the question of how best to deal 274 nietzsche’s new eternity with the soul’s leading or even comprehensive force: where Plato’s Socrates constructs a regime aimed at the proper education and satisfaction of eros, Nietzsche does the same with respect to will to power. Given this shared political character, the disagreement that is most fully addressed by the two books—and the one that provides entree into the others—is the question of will to power versus eros. This question is endlessly deep and endlessly complicated. What is will to power? What does it seek? In what does it find satisfaction? (Does such a question even make sense?) What leads to, and what constitutes, its perfection ? These questions can hardly be settled by the limited analysis I am attempting here. Yet it seems to me that the comparison of Beyond Good and Evil to the Republic provides the seed of an answer to the last question—which also, incidentally, carries with it the seeds to the answers to the other questions . Interestingly that seed, or at least its husk, its name, is the same for both Nietzschean will to power and Platonic eros. The thing that signifies the perfection of both will to power and eros—and therewith life’s highest fulfillment, both for Nietzsche and for Plato—is the embrace of eternity. The way to see this is to examine will to power and eros by way of their highest or most perfect exemplar, the philosopher.1 Will to power and eros are not comparable in every sense, even if considered only as psychic forces.2 They are comparable in the sense that each occupies the central place in the economy of the soul and might almost be said to constitute the soul. Yet whereas eros is depicted as a desire, or metadesire, such that it might attain fulfillment with the acquisition of the right object or experience (i.e., insight), will to power is depicted by Nietzsche as an eruption 1. Looking to the highest exemplar to discover the nature of a species may sound like a Platonic procedure, and it is; but it is also a Nietzschean procedure, as indicated by Nietzsche’s embrace of the idea that a ‘‘return to nature’’ would be a ‘‘going-up’’ to...

Share