I listened too much to Nietzsche as a teenager and stayed away from Plato. Taking a Symposium on The Republic in college confirmed to me every exciting prejudice Nietzsche held against Socrates. I had learned from Nietzsche the great principle that just because something is rational and works logically does not mean it is true, and argued against Plato from the perspective of Nietzsche's unpublished philosophical history of the pre-Socratics, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. One can see in this text how Nietzsche's anti-Platonism predates Socrates; derives from Socrates' predecessors. In an eccentric use of prefixes, Socrates is really an anti-pre-Socratic, and Nietzsche's anti-Platonism a form of pre-Socraticism extended into his modern age. However, Plato's non-political dialogues are incredible works. His speculations on cosmogony; the creation of man (anthropogony) and the elements; his engagement with Anaxagoras (pre-Socratic)'s cosmos. There are parts of Timeaus that Nietzsche never touched. There is an antechristian (read that prefix correctly) freedom present in the extant corpus of the Ancient Greeks that Nietzsche cannot always embody, and this flaw in Nietzsche is a sociological one I don't think he with all his dynamite could help. It principally concerns cosmogony and anthropogony. The ancient Greeks were free to speculate on the total creation of the universe and presuppose whatever they pleased, whatever they intuited. In turn, they intuited the atom, the law of the conservation of energy, and quantum superposition to name a few. It is ironic that despite being drawn to the pre-Socratics for this kind of freedom, the closest Nietzsche ever comes to speculating on the order of the universe is his Eternal Return, a beautiful idea but not quite a cosmogony, which many of his followers assert was merely a poetic thought experiment. In some sense, all of the development of intellectualism since the Christianization (and subsequent collapse) of Rome can be seen as either the gradual unyoking from the absurd existential centralization and enslavement of an unnecessary monotheism's prohibition on all deviational inquiry; or the unconscious adaption to the peculiar concepts of this monotheism derived in tents by obscure tribes who cut parts of their penises off. The direction one rebels in from Christianity and Abrahamic monotheism is still defined by Christianity and Abrahamic monotheism. Your opposition is dictated by it, is attached to it, is a reaction against it. You travel from it only so far as you react against it. Atheism is just such an ultimately shallow reaction against Christian hegemony. It is an invention of Christian hegemony. It is, genealogically speaking, Christian hegemony as applied to a state of godlessness. Atheism is just as rigid and religious; its God is the immutable, timeless "laws" and "constants" of nature that can admit of no heresies. As a political organ, as a STATE and civilization, Judaeo-Christianity made such a purchase on the very concept of cosmogony and anthropogony and precluded by death free speculation on it for so many centuries that, even to a mind as genius as Nietzsche, the Judaeo-Christian cosmogonies are nearly synonymous in his gut with the concept of cosmogony in general. Of course Nietzsche was aware of all religions and ideas concerning the origin and functioning of the universe and of man. But like many geniuses long under the yoke of the Bible's antiquated ridiculousness enforced by rote upon them; enforced as THE origin and truth; historical arguments and philosophies against "God" conflate themselves with arguments and philosophies against god, so to speak. Platonism was adapted to Christianity through neo-Platonism; however, Platonic or even pre-Socratic cosmogonies were never adapted to post-Christian or atheistic philosophy. Nietzsche never quite bothers arguing against Plato's versions of cosmogony. When God died, all possible prime movers went with Him. We see here one part of the fissuring of true philosophy and the fatal specialization of the modern age. Cosmogony breaks down into godless cosmology; philosophy, having finally destroyed the political and sociological monopoly of Christianity, concerns itself strictly with politics and sociology and ignores cosmology to its malnourishment; by Marx and by progressivism, philosophy BECOMES the chora, the raw material of atheist religion and mass hysteria; speculation on God and cosmogony remain, therefore, with the religious and the UAP enthusiast, half of whom try to interpret UAPs into Christianity. If you concern your pursuit of knowledge strictly with political and sociological genealogy; if you confuse metaphysics with atheistic terrestrial paradoxes; if you don't take Eternal Return seriously; if you try to re-relate the cosmos and prime mover to Abrahamic traditions and concepts, then you "walk lame to the end of your life," as Plato says of men who shirk education. Nietzsche is a consequential piece of pre-Socratic dynamite that points its escape velocity back to the true freedom of the Greeks. He did not make it all the way there, but that is not a flaw. You can only travel so far.

I will see 0/4 of these movies. When is the Evelyn Waugh biopic?

The leaves are turning, nights are cold. It’s time for Chianti, whiskey and Evelyn Waugh for the next six months.