The primary villain of this story was Plato, whom Nietzsche accused of setting philosophy on its rationalist track. Plato’s immortalisation of his teacher, Socrates, amounted to nothing less than a morbid obsession with intellectual martyrdom. His Theory of the Forms taught generations of philosophers to seek truth in metaphysical abstractions, while devaluing lived experiences in the physical world. Plato’s intellectual revolution, in particular, was born out of the destruction of myth. In his wake, philosophy had been left ‘stripped of myth’ and starved of cultural roots. Modern culture, for Nietzsche, continued to languish in the shadow of Plato’s legacy, still grappling with its ‘loss of myth, the loss of a mythical home, a mythical, maternal womb’.
Seven decades later, at the end of the Second World War, Karl Popper mounted what would become, after Nietzsche, the second-most famous attack on Plato in modern philosophy. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper suggested that Plato had provided Western thought with its first blueprint of the ‘closed society’. In the Republic, Plato envisioned an ideal city that prioritises the harmony of the collective over the freedom of individuals, the preservation of the status quo over innovation, and the authority of intellectual gatekeepers over democracy and truth. The toxic influence of Plato’s political vision, Popper argued, could be traced through the history of philosophy, all the way to Nazi Germany and other forms of contemporary totalitarianism.
Like Nietzsche, Popper blamed Plato for setting Western philosophy on the wrong course. He did so, however, for precisely the opposite reason. Popper’s Plato was no rationalist. Rather, Popper boiled down the difference between open and closed societies to the difference between a culture of criticism and a culture of myth. Plato, as the first and the greatest of the enemies of the open society, had advocated the suppression of free criticism in order to establish an ‘arrested state’, sustained by myths and deception. Pointing to the Republic’s controversial foundation narrative, the Myth of Metals, Popper credited Plato with writing an ‘exact counterpart’ to ‘the modern myth of Blood and Soil’.
Who was right? Was Plato a short-sighted rationalist, who led philosophy astray by unmooring it from a more authentic, mythic past? Or was he a devious mythmaker, who introduced an uneasy current of irrationalism into the citadel of reason? How could he be both? Put differently: was Plato to blame for steering philosophy away from myth, or for bringing it closer to myth?
Neither The Birth of Tragedy nor The Open Society is celebrated today for its author’s fidelity to historical accuracy. Nonetheless, both remain iconic because Nietzsche and Popper were each on to something resonant about the relationship between myth and philosophy, and the curious symbolic role of Plato in our inherited understandings of that relationship. READ MORE...
