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Essay / Great Philosopher: Plato and Nietzsche - 752
Plato and Nietzsche, both great philosophers who have shaped the narrative of Western philosophy, are often singled out to oppose each other, with Plato setting the scope from the beginning of the era of absolute truth and value, Nietzsche on the other hand presented his death. Plato's examination of a perfect society led him to believe that knowledge and power must be merged in order to achieve its full potential, while Nietzsche took this tradition and manipulated it differently to reveal that the Knowledge is power in a different disguise. Essentially, we always follow and return to Nietzsche's idea of power. In examining these two thinkers, the extraordinary depth of the two philosophers' questions and the difference in their answers leads one to reflect on the structure of philosophical thought and its continuing importance in how we preserve truth. Plato proposes that there are ultimate solutions, pure forms created by God behind every object in the world. For Plato, truth would derive essentially from the Good or from God and he examines this idea in his Analogy of the Cave, as he states to Glaucon as written by Socrates: "Next, I say, here is a situation which you can use as an example. analogy with the human condition – with our education or lack thereof. Imagine people living in a cavernous cell underground; At the bottom of the cave, very far away, there is an entrance open to the outside world. “He sets up this scenario to make it seem like these people have no choice and have been tied up since childhood,” he says. “With shadows replicating objects and prisoners knowing what those shadows actually mean. In "The Cave", Plato shows that he believes in an absolute and "... essential form of G...... middle of paper ...... the existence of words and the illusions of language will forever be our truth, therefore According to Nietzsche, art or illusions save man from reality, producing new metaphors and reconciling life. In conclusion, both philosophers had their differences which conflict with each other's theories. But they agree on a world of illusion; they both argue that humans live in our own illusory world that we think is reality when in reality we are not. The only important idea on which they disagree concerns their conception of what truth is and where that truth comes from. I used Plato's theory which is mainly based on his allegory of the caves where he explains human conditions and Nietzsche took it and dismantled it, creating what he says a world full of illusions but derived from the mind as a survival tactic. Truth is simply a world full of fantasy, but one is the result of God and the other of the mind..