Deleuze and Lacoue-Labartheon on the Reversal of Platonism: The Mimetic Abyss

Among Friedrich Nietzsche's many daring philosophical declarations, one of the most infamous and renowned is an early formula coined in his posthumously published notebooks: "My philosophy an inverted Platonism: the farther removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the better it is. Living in semblance as goal." ¹ As one can discern here, the theme of inverted Platonism entails a re-valuation of being, truth and the hierarchy between the real and apparent worlds as these notions are conceived within the framework of Platonic thought. Nietzsche's style of describing his philosophy as a reversal of Platonism has served as a major point of debate in the reception of his work, particularly since Martin Heidegger's influential lecture courses on the topic.

Heidegger endeavors to illuminate Nietzsche's reversal through reference to The Republic and the Platonic division between the sensuous and suprasensuous worlds. In exploring this division, Heidegger describes how Plato sunders truth (the realm of Ideas) from art (the realm of copying or mimesis), since the latter is incapable of reproducing the Idea in its self-presencing, or eidos, and hence falls short of the corresponding notion of truth as non-distortion, or aletheia (Nietzsche 162-87). For Heidegger, Plato's philosophy distances art from truth and relegates art to the status of semblance or the merely apparent. Thus in his manner of adhering to the strategy of reversal, Heidegger suggests that where Plato subjugates the sensuous world (the domain of aesthetics) to the suprasensuous realm of Ideas (the domain of being and truth), Nietzsche must oversee the subjugation, in turn, of the suprasensuous to the sensuous; if truth is worth more than art for Plato, then Nietzsche—in his "reversed" position—must declare that art is worth more than truth (Nietzsche 142-50, 188-99).

Yet in claiming to advance beyond any hasty interpretation of the theme, Heidegger attempts to complicate Nietzsche's reversal as a philosophical problem that exceeds a mere inversion or substitution of values. As he repeatedly emphasizes, only to reverse Plato's thinking without re-evaluating its underlying structure would be to remain caught within this structure, without overcoming it in any essential way. Therefore, Heidegger insists that more than a simple inversion of the hierarchy between the suprasensuous and the sensuous is required to effectively overturn Platonism; both of these domains must be abolished in the manner in which they are conceived within Platonic thought, together with the binary structure of "above" and "below." This, according to Heidegger, constitutes the true test of Nietzsche's philosophical endeavor:

as long as the "above and below" define the formal structure of Platonism, Platonism in its essence perdures ... [The] overcoming succeeds only when the "above" in general is set aside as such, when the former positing of something true and desirable no longer arises, when the true world—in the sense of the ideal—is expunged. What happens when the true world is expunged? Does the apparent world still remain? No. For the apparent world can be what it is only as a counterpart of the true. If the true world collapses, so must the world of appearances. Only then is Platonism overcome, which is to say, inverted in such a way that philosophical thinking twists free of it.

(Nietzsche 201)

Given Nietzsche's efforts to eschew the idealism of Plato's true world, Heidegger proclaims that the reversal must also surpass a simple affirmation of appearances, in order to avoid repeating the structure of Platonic thought. For Heidegger, such an affirmation would only constitute a new form of positivism ² and thus repeat the hierarchical structure of Platonic thought. Consequently, Heidegger attempts to pass beyond this kind of oppositional thinking by discussing how the Nietzschean notions of "embodying life" and "physiological aesthetics" replace Plato's conception of the sensible world. In Heidegger's estimation, Nietzsche inaugurates an original—if problematic or largely "incomplete"—philosophical project as he sets out to establish a new, transformed hierarchy in the ordering of the sensuous and the spirit, of art and truth (Nietzsche 211-20).

Heidegger's lecture...