Plato and the Simulacrum

Abstract

What is meant by the of Platonism? Nietzsche thus defines the task of his philosophy, or more generally, the task of the philosophy of the future. The phrase seems to mean abolishing the world of essences and the world of appearances. Such a project would not, however, be Nietzsche's own. The double objection to essences and appearance goes back to Hegel, and further still, to Kant. It is unlikely that Nietzsche would have meant the same thing. Further, this way of formulating the overthrow has the drawback of being abstract; it leaves the motivation for Platonism obscure. To overthrow Platonism should, on the contrary, mean bringing this motivation to light, tracking it down as Plato hunts down the Sophist. In very general terms, the motive for the theory of Ideas is to be sought in the direction of a will to select, to sort out. It is a matter of drawing differences, of distinguishing between the itself and its images, the original and the copy, the model and the simulacrum. But are all these expressions equal? The Platonic project emerges only if we refer back to the method of division, for this method is not one dialectical procedure among others. It masters all the power of the dialectic so as to fuse it with another power and thus to represent the whole system. One could initially say that it consists of dividing a genus into opposing species in order to place the thing under investigation within the correct species: thus the process of continuous specification in the search for a definition of the angler's art. But this is only the superficial aspect of the division, its ironic aspect. If one takes this aspect seriously, Aristotle's objection is clearly applicable; division is a bad and illegitimate syllogism, because it lacks a middle term that could, for example, lead us to conclude that angling belongs to the arts of acquisition and of acquisition by capture, and so forth. The real goal of division must be sought elsewhere. In the Statesman one finds an initial definition: the statesman is the shepherd of men. But all sorts of