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yet, though, would be not to err at all, and to reject an idea because it pleases isn’t a sure road to
truth, especially when the matter being considered is mysterious, e.g. the development of higher
faculties out of lower ones.)
There can be nothing easy about assessing experiential judgments, particularly where the
experiences at issue are rare and said to be the highest. But perhaps I can offer a helpful
suggestion in the form of a countervailing note. For all that I have just said about the question at
issue being a matter of interpreting experience, i.e. being subjective or at best inter-subjective,
there may well be a more objective approach to it – a political approach.
The political consequences of a nonpolitical doctrine cannot prove the doctrine true or
false. But what if what had appeared to be a nonpolitical idea is political after all? We do, after
all, judge the truth of political ideas at least in part from their consequences, and rightly so – one
needn’t be a pragmatist but only a kind of ethical or political naturalist to believe so. The issue at
hand, of course, is the antagonism between Nietzsche and Plato with respect to eternity. What
could be further from politics than that? Almost everything, as it happens. For the competing
views of eternity are not matters of metaphysical speculation but rather claims about experiences
that are held up by these thinkers as human perfection and thus as a general standard of goodness.
The antagonism concerns what is wanted and what is good for the soul. Which begins to sound
awfully political: what is politics, for Plato or for Nietzsche, if not “the art whose business it is to
care for souls”? (Laws 650b)
25
There is yet one more reason to approach the quarrel between Nietzsche and Plato
25
Nietzsche’s “great politics” (großen Politik, rendered by Kaufmann as “large-scale
politics; 208) primarily concerns conflict over matters cultural and spiritual, i.e. the care of souls.
Convention