Thread by @EveKeneinan

This is the basic problem with Wittgenstein. The early Wittgenstein falls into nihilism because he aspires to νόησις without λόγος; the latter Wittgenstein fails into nihilism because he descends into λόγος without νόησις.

Philosophy requires νόησις and λόγος, seeing and saying.

λόγος is equivalent to διάνοια. They are both names for discursive reason or the discursivity.

As in Rosen’s remark:

«It is therefore correct to say that the change it Wittgenstein’s teaching amounts to a rejection of "νόησις without διάνοια” in favor of “διάνοια without νόησις.»

Which as Rosen also says, means “either endless silence or endless chatter” that is “mysticism or sophistry”—either way Wittgenstein leads to the death of philosophy.

And Analytic Philosophy leads to and culminates in Wittgenstein.

While Wittgenstein boasts about never having read Aristotle, Heidegger returns to Aristotle again and again, and to Plato, and the Pre-Socratics—in order to carry out an Auseinandersetzung to be sure—but provoking such a face to face confrontation, he puts them back on the table.

The “destruction of the history of ontology” called for by Heidegger has the side effect of its original intention in Being and Time—to once again free up the possibility of thinking in a Platonic or Aristotelian way, outside the ossification of tradition that had encrusted them.

That is why, although they may be “fundamentally unsound” as Jeeves says about Nietzsche, both Nietzsche and Heidegger are VERY worth reading—by their sheer and total OPPOSITION to Plato and Aristotle, they often lead you TO Plato and Aristotle.

For me, it was DIRECT.

Nietzsche says that his philosophy is the antithesis of Plato, and that ultimately this antithesis is exhaustive. You MUST BE on one side or the other.

I think he is correct.

Nietzsche also taught me that mere “followers” were worthless. If I could not be a Nietzschean because I had thought through the matter myself and found I AGREED with Nietzsche, I had no business aping him and denouncing Plato—or “Plato for the people,” Christianity.

So, there was nothing for it. I needed to learn Greek and read Plato exhaustively and seriously. To allow Plato and Nietzsche to go head to head, in a Heideggerian Auseinandersetzung (I love that term).

It was one of the other.

Plato or Nietzsche.

Socrates or Zarathustra.

Plato won.

After coming to the conclusion that SOME KIND OF PLATONISM had to be true, and Platonism was “fundamentally sound” as Nietzsche is “fundamentally unsound,” I started working my way forward.

And eventually I reached that moment we could call my "pre-conversion."

I still remember the thought that went through my mind like a lightning bolt.

It was not, at the time, an entirely welcome thought.

“Ah, shit. Christianity is true, isn’t it?”

One of those fateful moments in my life.

My moment of actual conversion was also somewhat dramatic, but that was later. This was the point where things fell intellectually into place. Conversion, μετάνοια, though, is NOT an intellectual thing, or not ONLY an intellectual thing.

An earlier one, in retrospect, may have been and exchange (on the phone) with my mother:

Me: “Mom, you know I’m an atheist, right?”
Mom: “No you aren’t.”

I’m still not sure if she was TELLING me or ORDERING me.

In any event, she was CORRECTING me.

And, as it turns out, Mom was right.