Plato#
Summary#
In the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius invokes Plato as a philosophical ideal while cautioning against expecting the perfection of Plato’s Republic in real life. Nietzsche presents Plato as the embodiment of aristocratic philosophy, whose mode of thought resisted vulgar sense-evidence by casting “pale, cold, grey conceptional networks” over the sensory world. Nietzsche also critiques Plato for adopting Socratic morality that was beneath his noble nature, transforming Socrates into an idealized figure that served as a vessel for Plato’s own philosophical disguises.