Most of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato because it can be understood as various efforts to resolve the tension established by Plato’s dualism between eternal forms and temporal phenomena: the medieval God and his creation, Descartes’s mental and physical realms, Spinoza’s substance and its modes, Kant’s noumena and phenomena, and so forth. In each of these, the first term has explicit or implicit priority over the second, and Nietzsche was able to predict the nihilism of twentieth-century Western civilization because he realized that disappearance of that first term — God,
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