Google, Grandfathers and God(s): Nietzsche and Plato on Ancestral Authority

The ever-changing technological landscape is shifting generational patterns of authority.Authority is grounded in knowledge.Knowledge-technical, moral, or otherwisecommonly proceeds from an older generation to a younger one.This is changing.Younger generations in the Western world are posing their questions to Google rather than Grandpa or God.Such challenges to the hierarchy of generational knowledge are not entirely novel though, and the history of Western political thought suggests that they are telling indicators of impending political change.The study engages two examples, one in Nietzsche ("Second Treatise" of On the Genealogy of Morality) and one in Plato ("Book One" of The Republic), wherein lapsed generational authority is discussed alongside the topic of justice.In the texts, both authors proceed from a definition of justice associated with ancestral authority and described in the language of debt and credit.Justice is what is owed to one's ancestors.Ancestral knowledge provides the first codification of duties or obligations.It is the first sense of law.It describes a clear division between the ruler (to whom one's obligations are due) and the ruled.To date, the vast literature on these authors has not yet considered how the precise concept of ancestral authority informs the political meaning of their works.This is particularly the case for Nietzsche.The contest that he invokes with Plato, his philosophical ancestor, requires meditation on the significance of this idea.This iii comparative analysis meets this objective in two ways.First, it analyzes the selections to understand what happens politically and philosophically when the primary direction of intergenerational education changes.Second, it proposes that Nietzsche's politics of cultural formation should be understood as a non-nostalgic recovery of ancestral authority.This concept is central in Nietzsche's understanding of the shift from kinshipbased models of justice to what he calls in §12 of the Second Treatise, "misarchism" or the "democratic idiosyncrasy" of being against the idea of rule itself.His account of justice describes the theological conditions that informed the shift from tribalism to universalism in the West, and, by this account, he forces an assessment of the limits of overwriting the grandfathers' generational knowledge.examples, one in Nietzsche ("Second Treatise" 6 of On the Genealogy of Morality 7 ) and one in Plato ("Book One" of The Republic 8 ), wherein lapsed generational authority is discussed alongside the topic of justice.It does so to better understand Nietzsche's charge against Plato's Socrates that he might be held responsible for setting forth the conditions of relativism that undermine traditional orders.Nietzsche accuses Plato's Socrates 9 of democratizing the power of dialectics so that "the rabble gets on top." 10 Indeed, it is Plato and his Socrates that Nietzsche polemically charges with "dogmatism," with "the invention of the pure spirit and the good as such," and with laying the groundwork for democracy to adopt a political-theology in the form of the Judeo-Christian tradition.11 Or, using the language of the Genealogy Plato's Socrates is accused of creating the conditions for "the slave revolt in morality" 12 in Western history.In the voice of the Athenian accusers, Nietzsche charges Plato's Socrates with corrupting the youth, undermining the gods of the city, and setting forth a tradition of rationalism ripe for universalization.He displaces the poetry of the ancestors and places a new value upon the practice of dialogue among friends.He privileges philosophic peers.And he 6 Herein "Second Treatise" will be referenced as Genealogy II.7 The title will henceforth be abbreviated as Genealogy.References to passages will be denoted by Roman and then Arabic numerals.8 Herein the title will be shortened to "Republic" and its corresponding part (e.g., Republic I). 9 While I will also comment upon the depictions of Socrates by Aristophanes and Xenophon over the course of this study, its focus will be upon Plato's Socrates, insofar as this is the character with whom Nietzsche engages most consistently.10 Nietzsche, "Socrates," in Twilight of the Idols, §2.11 Nietzsche, "Preface," in Beyond Good and Evil.12 Nietzsche's actual accusation at Genealogy, I.7 and Beyond Good and Evil, §195 is that the Jewish tradition is the cause of the slave revolt in morality.The claim here is that the accusation that Nietzsche levels against Plato is not that he "caused" the revolt, but that he created its conditions.That is, he created the conditions wherein philosophy could be ruled by religion, and wherein religion could create new moralities. CHAPTER ONE Philosophy, Poetry, and PoliticsIt seems to me that Plato mixes together all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first décadent.-Nietzsche, Twilight of Idols

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