Anti-platonism

8.Vitalism: Nietzsche-Bergson-Deleuze (b)

Let’s now follow the genealogy of Nietzsche’s own relation to Plato, which includes all the above, necessarily. Clearly it’s with regard to this great error that Nietzsche proceeds across his oeuvre but his thematic repetition does so with its own difference.

We’ll start with the Birth of Tragedy. In this book one of the things Nietzsche does is extract Socrates from Plato. It’s a common notion but it’s not as simple as designating the distinction or the difference. Thus in many ways it’s a procedure of subtraction; what is Socrates in the platonic dialogues such that it can be seen to found a new illusion for mankind? Originally, for Nietzsche, it’s a negative project of Socrates, the negation of tragedy – Nietzsche was still dialectical himself in this early work – following the dialectic in Plato. So Socrates negates tragedy by means of the question, or really, of its rationality.

That tragedy could not be deemed rational meant it was not on the side of the intelligible and was thus lacking in what was necessary to be called knowledge, the only thing worth pursuing and the only thing too that could make a change in the world possible, for the good. This is what drives the philosopher on, Socrates reckoned, this desire that life be intelligible; this is what Nietzsche designates as ‘will to knowledge’. This is the attraction of philosophy, Nietzsche says, because Socrates makes it into a ‘way of life’.

It’s not a secretive procedure but a world making one. I should stress, Nietzsche recognises the power of this move but he doesn't approve. Thus, Nietzsche argues, Plato did not influence later men so much through his ‘theory of ideas’ as through his presentation of philosophy as the only satisfying way of life in his portrait of Socrates. And concomitantly, in The Birth of Tragedy,  Nietzsche doesn't  criticise Plato so much for inventing the ‘other world’ of the Ideas as he does for making poetry or tragedy merely ancillary to philosophy. That’s to say that tragedy is the irrational expression of what must be taken up by knowledge itself.

For Nietzsche, as we have touched on, the notion of this knowledge or that there is an intelligible order to things is already an illusion. Thus this notion that we need to find this order which somehow exists, that knowledge is knowledge of the world as it is. If such an order is an illusion then, clearly, Socrates’ rationalism is itself an artistic invention, a perspective and not definitive beyond any perspective whatsoever. For Nietzsche, Socrates is the creator of this illusion and not Plato – Plato describes with great genius what Socrates invents as true.

Of course, what gives Socrates invention of intelligibility credibility is that he dies for it. He never admits his art, you might say – he is given ample opportunity to at the trial and in the Phaedo there is a nice but strange bit where Socrates has a crack at verse. Is this an admission?

Anyway, here is what Nietzsche says: ‘The image of the dying Socrates, as the human being whom knowledge and reason have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission - namely; to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the end.’

For Nietzsche (and I think this is not untrue) Socrates essentially engineers his own death by precisely being this uncompromising, enigmatic or singular figure, who at no stage, it seems, would stoop to artistry, and dies to prove it. Except of course for Nietzsche, to not admit art and to die for it, was the falsification or artistry par excellence. But Socrates made this life of not-art true by living it, which is paradoxical enough for Nietzsche because despite everything it points to the value of life over knowledge of it. But the problem of Socrates remains here because: ‘did Socrates really not know what he was up to? Did he knowingly create his own myth through deeds rather than speeches? Did he understand the limits of the logos  he was wont to celebrate in dialectical conversation? Did philosophy involve intentional deception, even self-deception?’

Nietzsche clearly thinks that it does and that this is written into the history of philosophy, which at the time for Nietzsche meant also the history of science too. We have seen already how many equate metaphysics and the sciences just as Nietzsche has done here, supposing they both hold to the illusion of an order excluded or distinct from the things of the world as such. This is why he opposes Art to philosophy here, which is more honest in its premises and more useful in its effects. But why or of what value is this deception for knowledge? This he has to work out.

After BT, Nietzsche took a bit of a turn. In BT, as I said, it’s a dialectical set up and so knowledge is opposed to tragedy – thus all that pertains to knowledge is on one side, all that of art or poetry on the other, with the relation each has to deception playing the third. But then he realises that these distinctions don't hold: first he thinks philosophy is itself distinct from science and art and argues philosophy pre-existed Socrates and hence Socrates is not a founder but maybe a break, a break with philosophy as such. This is a familiar sort of story – the pre-Socratic poetic philosophy interrupted by the Socratic rationalism. But Nietzsche changes tack and assigns the break to Plato, not Socrates after all.

For him, Thales, Anaxagoras etc., sought, like poetry, after origins but in an entirely different language and grammar. Catherine Zuckert puts it like this:

‘The difference in expression reflected a substantive difference of fundamental importance. To express one's thought in images is to see or to conceive of the world anthropomorphically. Thales declared that not man but water was the truth and the core of things. As a scientist and in contrast to the poets, Thales sought truth without regard to the human consequences. Nietzsche notes that, ‘Aristotle rightly says that 'What Thales and Anaxagoras know will be considered universal, astonishing, difficult and divine, but never useful, for their concern was not with the good of humanity’. Pre-Platonic philosophy was characterised by a scientific stance which was essentially amoral.’

So this amorality or this individuality if you prefer is key. Nietzsche is not at all against this, rather he takes it as a critical sign of the creative vision of philosophy: albeit a sign philosophy eschews precisely because it gives universal significance to these individual inventions, that is, it supposes in this invention some notion of the all in one. ‘We meet it in every philosophy,’ Nietzsche says, ‘together with the ever renewed attempt at a more suitable expression, this proposition that ‘all things are one’.

In other words, philosophy supposes that what it finds in its own way is precisely the truth of the world but for Nietzsche, as Zuckert puts it: ‘the whole cannot be subordinated to a part without distortion. If all existence is particularistic, however, the truth can be perceived and literally incorporated only in a particular form of existence. The ‘truth’ can never, therefore, be adequately expressed as a doctrine; words (and, hence, concepts) are inadequate.’

In short, then, the Pre-Platonic philosopher sees the whole world in himself. All philosophic ‘truths’ or doctrines constitute errors; they merely represent one man’s vision or experience of his own existence. They are true only of and for him. Philosophic doctrines should not therefore be studied so much as arguments, opinions or even visions, as they should be celebrated as signs of supreme individuality: ‘So this has existed-once, at least-and is therefore a possibility, this way of life, this way of looking at the human scene.’

So Nietzsche reads back from Socrates and finds the same move there, which means that Socrates is not the bad guy, really, just part of the continuum which shows itself as illusion but importantly also as unity. The old Greeks, as it were, were distinct in themselves but as such committed to the unity of their cultures and communities.  He thinks Plato starts to play psychologist by admitting into his dialogues all sorts of possible positions on things and so ushers in philosophical division. Hence all the sects and schools etc., that make an allegiance of some sort to the dialogues, if not to Plato.

Nietzsche is a complicated dude: why would he be bothered by this multiplication of schools? Well in the pre-Plato philosophers this conjunction of example and unity is the model for that of order and rule or legislation. So the order attained by philosophy is the rule of all. Nietzsche is always after this, whether it’s in philosophy or not. He maintains that this is what philosophy is about, it’s just that he doesn't find it in the post-platonic run of the mill and hence the genealogy he conducts.

This genealogy he announces as the new educational method (see Untimely Meditations). He thinks that in the Socratic science model we are assaulted by knowledge, too much knowledge of everything, especially of the past and ‘of our cultures’ history. It’s oppressive and difficult to escape in terms of what it determines us to do and be. Knowledge in this first sense is a burden to life but we can’t just get out of it. There is only the world we are in for Nietzsche after all and that’s part of the problem of course because this very orientation to knowledge is what presses us. N says: ‘It is always a dangerous process .... Since we happen to be the results of earlier generations, we are also the results of their aberrations, passions and errors, even crimes; it is not possible quite to free oneself from this chain.’

But this knowledge - knowledge in the Socratic scientistic form, thus of its very search – looked at askew, as it were, can render up another knowledge of it; that’s the genealogical effect. What Nietzsche means is that we inherit all this knowledge and indeed the knowledge of it as knowledge – this latter inheritance is the real problem insofar as it amounts to a piety, really – but we no longer know this knowledge we essentially believe in it. To free ourselves from the worst of it, to become impious if you like, we need to criticise not only what we know but the faith we have in knowledge as such.

But do note, here, what Nietzsche is saying. He is not anti-knowledge like some romantics pathologise; he is saying we need to criticise the very means of our knowing as part of the criticism of knowledge which makes any knowledge, knowledge in the first place.  ‘Like Plato’ he says, ‘we have to criticise previous thinkers; we are, after all, descendants of the Platonic tradition, and we cannot change the fact that we descend from it.  But as modern thinkers, we can, indeed, we must, be more honest and scientific than Plato.’

So for Nietzsche this is the reason of the noble lie: Plato, he reckons, reckoned that to maintain a social order people needed to believe there was natural order that social order reflects – thus knowledge of the natural order determined the social order; knowledge is the means to naturalisation (this notion is still very much around today in our unscientific age). For Nietzsche, Plato’s lie is that this accord is so. But Nietzsche suggests, if this is a lie, then perhaps there is no natural order at all, all actual orders have been based on ignorance, error, deceit and violence; the true basis of what passes as knowledge.

It’s curious this part of Nietzsche work because he is aiming squarely at the truth of knowledge and this being what is proper to education. He is being very Socratic or scientific and Plato, by contrast with his strange insistence on the lie as basis for the just city, looks like a poet, telling a sweet story of origins in order to found a city. You know the quote from Aristophanes to wit if you want to found a city get a poet? Such a notion as this, that to perpetuate human community requires illusion or artistry, would be everything we suppose Plato opposed. So you can see the motif though, of something being in Plato unexposed and we get with Nietzsche what we get with everyone: the interminable search in Plato for what is needed to overcome Plato.

For Nietzsche, the key problem at this stage in his work – the books like Human all too Human and Daybreak for example – is that with Socrates, philosophy became too moral. Hence Socratic science – also in Thales et al – turned inward and man became, as for Protagoras, the measure of all things. Thus it became unscientific, humanist almost, especially insofar as happiness became the question. ‘Philosophy severed itself from science when it put the question: what is the knowledge of the world through which mankind may be made happiest? This happened when the Socratic school arose.’

Philosophy thus becomes self-conscious and for Nietzsche, as is typical of his amoral approach, when it became moral it became deceptive. But also interesting. Basically, the search for human happiness rather than knowledge in general – of the world and so on, regardless of man’s place – requires deception or art. Nietzsche thinks that this is what Plato was up to but this couldn't be admitted and had to be given in a discourse supposed to be knowledgeable, in the scientistic sense. So truth and morality are very distinct for Nietzsche and he basically accuses the tradition of conflating them, of claiming after truth but seeking to build moral edifices, hence maintaining in what ever new way the illusion that the social concurs with the natural. Thus for Nietzsche, critiques of reason, for example, are misplaced. The question needs to be not how we know but why we seek knowledge at all?

To ask this is to look beyond knowledge itself, which is the point; to break out of that straightjacket of epistemological self-regard without of course any recourse to transcendence or idea, which is to say, then, that the why of knowledge is linked clearly to the body, to desire and need and so on. Hence to some vital force or other.

So in the Gay Science he shifts the terms of his approach in line with what i just said. As Zuckert explains:

‘Human beings acquired their first concepts or ideas through an error of their senses which suggested “that there are enduring things, that there are equal things, that there are things, substances, and bodies, that a thing is what it appears, that our will is free, that what is good for me is also good absolutely”. These errors were formulated and perpetuated because they proved useful to people; they helped preserve the species. “It was only very late that the deniers and doubters of such propositions came forward”.’

So doubting the senses makes sense and is an advance but this entails the affirmation that knowledge always presupposes life and thus a non-knowledge if you will, that knowledge is essentially in the service of. Again, this presupposition is one of the things knowledge covers over in order to be the all of what we are or can be for Nietzsche but clearly it means that knowledge can never be affirmed in complete abstraction from the requirements of life.

For Nietzsche, the Eleatics, so Parmenides, Zeno etc., were the first to mark this distinction but also unify it. Nietzsche says it this way: ‘that they devised the sage as the man of immutability, impersonality and universality of intuition ... ; they were of the belief that their knowledge was at the same time the  principal of life. Parmenides expressed this as ‘it is the same to think as to be’.’

As we have touched on, the Eleatics propose, then, the One of Being, never changing, eternal and so on which is critiqued in 9 points in the dialogue, Parmenides and again differently in the Sophist. It’s not refuted by Plato but it’s not settled on either thus marking (as Lacan will attest against Heidegger) an originary division in the ‘thought of being’. For Nietzsche, the Eleatics, then, wanted to free themselves from the flux, from the interminable change of the sensual world, by recourse to the intelligible work of cool thought, so to speak. Listen to the way Nietzsche describes it:

‘to deceive themselves concerning their own condition; they had to attribute to themselves impersonality and unchanging permanence, they had to mistake the nature of the philosophic individual, deny the force of the impulses in cognition, and conceive of reason generally as an entirely free and self-originating activity.’

This is Parmenides not Plato he says. But note the beginning: to deceive themselves. Nietzsche turns it around now. Knowledge as such is deception writ rational. Rationality, then, is what is removed from, absolutely distinct from the body, desire, interest etc… this structure becomes a staple. But for Nietzsche of course the game is sort of up, especially if we follow the genealogy of knowledge as it were. We see there that this structure itself leads to all sorts of attempts to get around it. Plato being one, for in Plato you find presented there, the various efforts at discourse to do just that and so philosophy shows itself there to be thinking about its own conditions, so to speak.

Nietzsche thinks, in these middle-late works, this is an advance rather than a decline. But you can see why. It seems to reflect a pluralisation of the discourse which recognises a need. ‘The human brain was gradually filled with such ... ferment ... [that] the intellectual struggle became a business, an attraction, a calling, a duty; an honour: cognising and striving for the true finally arranged themselves as needs among other needs.’

To put it another way, knowledge basically becomes vocational – a lived experience in the world like others, insofar as some need is served and thus not a special realm reserved for special beings. A mirror, note, of the natural/social conflation.  But of course this is not to say that for Nietzsche this is some sort of egalitarianism. His question shifts then to something like this. ‘Now that the impulse to truth has proved  itself to be a life-preserving power ... , how far is truth susceptible of embodiment?’

This is how Zuckert sums this question in relation to Plato and Socrates:

‘Plato did not invent the doctrine of the intelligible world. Rather he saw that this doctrine or postulate constituted a necessary condition for maintaining the only life truly worth living. As the first to reconceive philosophy as the definition of human happiness, Plato and his hero-teacher Socrates perhaps understood more of what they were doing than their successors. Socrates and Plato saw that no human action is disinterested: they taught that all men, philosophers perhaps preeminently, seek their own conception of what is good. Nietzsche doubted that Plato believed his own doctrines. ‘Is Plato's integrity beyond question? [We] know at least that he wanted to have taught  as absolute truth what he himself did not regard as even conditionally true: Namely, the separate existence and separate immortality of ‘souls'. Plato taught what was necessary to maintain philosophy as a way of life.’

So from Plato/Socrates’ concern for happiness we see that affect, thus a matter of the senses, presupposes the knowledge brought to bear on the question. Life is presupposed even as it is rationalised so to speak. It’s this honesty that needs to be enveloped in a knowing discourse in order to hide what is true of it – a certain arbitrariness to order, chance to social being and so on and so for Nietzsch, Zuckert is saying, Plato lies to a) maintain the order of the city b) so that philosophy might go on unmolested thinking otherwise about the truth of things. It’s an interesting reading of the split between the ordinary world of opinions and the philosophical word that seeks after the truth of them.

I should note that Zuckert is essentially a Straussian, so the reading she gives tends Nietzsche in this direction, primarily. But it is the case that for Nietzsche the question of a sort of archi-politics was fundamental in this – archi designating the coming together in one place or site of rule and legitimacy. Nietzsche wouldn't say it but this is the place occupied by the supposed philosopher king: ‘Plato has given us a splendid description of how the philosophical thinker must within every existing society count as the paragon of all wickedness: for as critic of all customs he is the antithesis of the moral man.’ But he’s not just a critic, Nietzsche is saying, but is himself a figure of desire, thus seeks to replace existing society with another form of it. This is his danger, in both senses.

For Nietzsche, then, the discipline of thought, of act, of behaviour, of reason, and so one we see acted out and prescribed in Plato and or in Plato’s Socrates, is a result of their efforts to tame or order this drive. Reason is the order of the senses we might say, keeping to the notion that knowledge presupposes life.

For Nietzsche, it’s not that Plato or Socrates bring this order to bear on the senses that is their problem, it’s that they disguise, as it were, the true nature of philosophy in doing so. Philosophy, for Nietzsche, is legislation. Thus in his terms, the declaration of the highest values. And so – and this with but beyond the philosophers designated hitherto, from Plato to Kant to Hegel who only gave order to all existing knowledge – ‘[G]enuine Philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators; they say, 'thus it shall be!' ... This ‘knowing' is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is-will to power.’

So you can see the trouble Nietzsche has with Plato, insofar as the type of philosopher who would present himself as this figure of radical change will not last long and yet this is what philosophy aims at. To last long the philosopher needs to dissimulate what philosophy aims at, so even as N recognises this and recognises it in Plato it makes it hard to pin down Plato because Plato must dissemble. Accordingly, across the years Nietzsche changes his responses, he even contradicts himself, but as he says, he is big enough for this. Like Whitman, he contains multitudes.

Anyway, one thing Nietzsche does object to in the way Plato proceeds, and in the Notes for the posthumously published book Will to Power, he describes it as a self-deceit, is when Plato takes what is good for him as philosopher, as he desired it, and turns it into what is good in itself.  Thus you can see what Nietzsche has opened up with his notion of will to power, which is another way of describing what we saw above, whereby knowledge presupposes life. That is that the Ideal be brought back to or shown, if you like, in its true sense, that is, as inscribed within the life of the philosopher, which is certainly a way of life, and one directed toward changing life as such or in other words, the Ideal has genealogy, which is to say, a basis in life and so the ideal is itself will to power.

For Nietzsche, at this point, so late in his life, suffering, on the way to the final breakdown and madness, Plato is a self-deceiver; earlier though his deception had been a conscious one. Again which Plato is? Indeed this is part of Nietzsche’s strategy, consistent with his claims for philosophy. Hence he is Plato’s rival especially over the nature and form of philosophical activity, an immanent practice of bringing order to the senses, experienced somewhat like in Spinoza as a joy or an overflowing, which he then ‘gives to all mankind’ as it were. 

In other words, where Plato deceives, Nietzsche will affirm. Zarathustra is his Socrates. Except that really, Zarathustra is Nietzsche qua philosopher; Nietzsche looking at himself, unlike Socrates who is Plato looking away.

We’ll take up this Nietzschean Socrates next time, before heading into Deleuze’s own version of this rivalry with the ideal, the dialectic and with Platonism, in the rise of the simulacrum.