Lia’s Reviews > Heidegger and the Death of God: Between Plato and Nietzsche > Status Update

for Nietzsche: modern atheism remains just as theistic as the theism it denies... generated by modern science’s “death of God,” [it] remains ultimately unable to free itself from its entrenchment in theism... because it still puts faith in the primary theistic value: truth.

modern science for Nietzsche is a project that not only began with Plato, but fails to realize that it is still utterly Platonic, and thus theistic, for it fails to realize that it not only values but believes in objective truth and intelligibility, of which it thinks it can have knowledge (scientia).

to argue for any intelligibility, i.e., “being” or “truth,” is to place oneself within the realm of metaphysics, and thus in the Platonic realm ipso facto.

the Nietzschean position (by Nietzsche’s own admission) is the truth of naturalism, of all types, in that this position makes the metaphysics of naturalism explicit, and thus brings the logic of naturalism to its (logical) conclusion

the essence of Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, namely that Nietzsche remains within the metaphysical and the Platonic system, and thus within the modern scientific project as well.

Heidegger uses Nietzsche as a means toward better insight into modernity

Nietzsche is, therefore, for Heidegger, a thinker concerned with the Seinsfrage, the being question, at least insofar as metaphysics is capable of thinking such a question

I nevertheless fundamentally agree (as does Heidegger largely) with Nietzsche’s reading of the history of philosophy as the history of metaphysical Platonism, which ipso facto means that any concession to the objective, ontological status of intelligibility leads inevitably not only to mind-independence, but to transcendence (i.e., metaphysics) and to the transcendent itself.

I concede, with Nietzsche, that, following Plato, all subsequent philosophies and philosophical systems, including Aristotle up and through Descartes and Hegel, are none other than Platonism, insofar as each of these “systems” axiomatically assumes the split world between being/becoming, transcendent/immanent, intelligible/sensible, etc 🤔