Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism and Christian Morality

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), trained as a classical philologist and appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the unusually young age of twenty-four, framed much of his mature philosophy as an assault on what he called Platonism for the people. In Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung, written 1888, published 1889), in the chapter titled 'How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable,' Nietzsche narrates the history of Western metaphysics as a gradual, six-stage collapse of Plato's distinction between a true, eternal world of Forms and a merely apparent, changing world of the senses. For Plato, in dialogues such as the Republic (Books VI–VII) and the Phaedo, the sensible world perceived by the body is inferior, deceptive, and merely a shadow of the intelligible realm of the Forms, accessible only to reason; the philosopher's task, on this view, is to turn the soul away from appearance and toward the unchanging Good. Nietzsche regarded this two-world metaphysics as a symptom of decline (décadence): a devaluation of the only world that actually exists, the physical, changing, embodied world of Werden (becoming), in favor of an invented afterworld (Hinterwelt) that answers to weakness and resentment rather than to any genuine insight.