Fehler gefunden?
Erweiterte Suche
English Deutsch

As Platonic as Zarathustra: Nietzsche and Gustav Teichmüller


Zurück zum Heft: Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Band 57
DOI: 10.28937/9783787336678_9
EUR 16,90


In a letter to Franz Overbeck from 1883 Nietzsche confessed that the more heread the German philosopher Gustav Teichmüller the more he realized »how poorly« he understood Plato and »how much Zarathustra Platonizes« (Πλατωνίζει). This is a striking admission from a thinker who defined his own philosophy as »inverted Platonism « and it has yet to be adequately explained. This article examines what Nietzsche may have meant by the verb »to Platonize« by drawing an explicit connection to Teichmüller’s controversial views on Platonic psychology. Two possible meanings of the verb are put forth, a weak (rhetorical) and a strong (philosophical) meaning and a case in defense of the latter is made. In the strong sense of the word »to tonize« meant that the Overman was a mythos in the Platonic sense, in that it made Nietzsche’s much more recondite »Bundle Theory« of the self accessible to the average reader, but it did not correspond to a view of the self which Nietzsche espoused in his own voice.