152 NietzscheThinking became an exercise in successful life, able to climb up above a
hierarchy of concepts on a divine ladder of abstractions. Where was it
headed? To the point from which being as a whole is revealed as the well-
regulated good. Plato depicted an inspired universe, a spheric harmony
with which thinking accords. Platonic cognition meant discovering the
good in the world and becoming good in the process.
One could hardly imagine a sharper contrast to the empty space of
atoms and the senseless and unintentional motion of Democritus. For
Democritus, nature was sublimely indifferent, beyond good and evil.
For Plato, on the other hand, the whole was good. Evil betrays deficient
understanding, which would inhibit the individual from adapting to this
whole. Plato's ontology of the good was his response to the neutralized
universe of Democritus. It was a matter of energetic remoralization and
remythification of the essence of the wodd. Why this whole idealistic
reaction on the part of Platonism? Nietzsche's answer: "Fear about one-
self becomes the soul of philosophy" (8,106). A person who has awak-
ened to consciousness simply cannot tolerate existence in a cold,
atomistic universe, but instead longs for the feeling of being at home.
Philosophy is nothing but a longing to get home. In this sense, Nietzsche
noted in his comparison between Democritus and Plato, Plato's philos-
ophy was an "attempt to think everything through to the end and be the
redeemer" (8,106). Nietzsche knew the history of the polis well enough
to understand that Platonic idealism was a response to political anxiety.
The Democritean disenchantment of being and the triumph of an
objectifying enlightenment could unravel the moral foundations of the
polis. Plato fought against the specter of moral nihilism and a material-
ist devaluation of values.
In his notebooks, Nietzsche first committed to paper what he would
come to express frequendy in later writings, namely his astonishment at
the success of Platonism in the Christian West. Plato was aiming to pro-
tect the small circle of the polis intellectually, and in the process created
an intellectual framework for an entire cultural domain over the course
of many centuries. The Platonic-Christian view prevailed in myriad