Why Nietzsche Hated Plato

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You might’ve come across a famous quote on the internet in which Nietzsche calls Plato “boring.”

This is obviously a provocation on Nietzsche’s part, considering the influence Plato’s had on Western philosophy. But that doesn’t mean he just blurted it out without reason.

Nietzsche has a very specific bone to pick with Plato.

Plato’s theory of forms, broadly speaking, holds that the physical, material world is only an ephemeral, imperfect reflection of a truer, timeless world of forms or ideas.

These ideas are the essence of things. For example, there are many cups in the world. But they all share the same essence: they all participate in the idea of “cupness.” The ideal cup exists somewhere as a Platonic idea or form. Without this idea, we couldn’t call a cup, well, a cup.

In Platonism, the material world is imperfect compared to the world of ideas. A geometrical example can make things clearer: imagine a circle. It’s impossible to draw a mathematically perfect circle in the real world. The perfect circle exists only as an idea, as a concept. But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw circles at all. The theory of forms tries to explain why we recognize this imperfect circular shape as a circle. It’s because the drawing participates in the idea of the circle. It shares its essence.

So there is the imperfect material world and there is the perfect world of forms. Should we focus our philosophical efforts on the imperfect world or on the perfect world? The answer is obvious.
And you can see how these ideas can transform over time into Christianity. The Platonic world of forms becomes the Kingdom of God or Heaven – it’s the same underlying idea that the material world is imperfect but there exists a spiritual world of perfection someplace else, on a metaphysical level.

This is the idea of the Hinterwelt – and it takes many forms. It’s the world of ideas in Plato, heaven in Christianity, the thing-in-itself in Kant, and the Will in Schopenhauer. These proposed metaphysics are different in detail but not in essence. For Nietzsche, they are all different instantiations of the Hinterwelt, a beyond-world that is somehow more perfect or everlasting than the material world.

This notion of the Hinterwelt began with Plato and survived up until Nietzsche’s day, and depending on who you ask, it still persists today.

But Nietzsche’s problem with Plato doesn’t stop at a simple disagreement on metaphysics. For Nietzsche, there is a psychological component to the Hinterwelt.

The Hinterwelt, in Nietzsche’s psychological analysis, is exposed as a refuge for the weak. They construct this imaginary artificial world to hide from the real, material world in which they’re not faring too well.

We explore this deeper in our hour-long analysis of Nietzsche’s work On The Genealogy of Morals. Again, link in description.

In that work, Nietzsche argues that in the struggle for power, the strong win from the weak. The weak, in turn, need to find a psychological mechanism to cope with this position of inferiority.

One such coping mechanism, is the construction of an imaginary world which allows them to escape the real world. The emergence of these kind of Hinterwelt philosophies, is for Nietzsche the chief symptom of décadence, the sign of an unhealthy culture.

We cannot fully explain the ramifications or meaning of these loaded terms in a short video such as this. If you’re interested, you can check out our videos on the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols.