/lit/ - Literature

>>9042564

>what do you mean...that nietzsche is returning to plato's 'noble lie'?

again, sorry, this was a matter of lack of specificity on my part: i meant "returning to plato" as a type of appropriation, not necessarily a fulfillment. what i hope the previous posts i made might illustrate are some of the relations between plato and nietzsche: i see nietzsche as picking up the project of socrates (ironically, given his idea of socrates as "the first jew" and his critique of socrates as creating a supra-natural world--"ethics"--by which to judge this one, as THE maneuver of power that ended the early reign of the brutish but adept "proto-overmen" and the first time man became "deep") in such a way that he is the first philosopher after plato to seriously consider what it means to carve out a place for oneself as a philosopher in a world of sophists and democrats. that both fall on the "lie" (have you read martin jay's "the virtues of mendacity"?--i think this is a really interesting overview of the role of the lie/lying in western political theory) i think is an interesting and vital moment in this history of thought; although they do so from different angles, the treatment of the lie is so central to the operation of the political sphere that it opens up spaces that will be filled by machiavelli, arendt, etc. with their own prescriptive uses of the lie, more or less as derivative versions of either the platonic or nietzschean versions.

in short, i think you are absolutely right--i see nietzsche's relation to plato as christ's relation to the jewish law: his was both the acceptance of a lineage and the refoundation of that lineage in a different soil


what, if you don't mind me asking, do you do as a profession? are you a younger man? i imagine that you are like some of the deeper thinkers i've met, and therefore have a series of problems that you return to or that define your focus at any given time--what ideas most interest you/are you pursuing most passionately now?