Caught Between Becoming and Being

Nietzsche called himself an ‘inverted Platonist’, and diligently worked to ‘drag’ Being back into the realm of becoming. Thus, in this chapter I address Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism, according to which Eternity is an imitation or hyperbole of Time, as well as I tackle the issue of heroism through Nietzschean lenses. In doing so, I intend to explore the alternative to both the heroic solution and the Platonic solution to immortality, while trying to cycle back to Plato’s solution through Diotima’s speech from Symposium. Subsequently, I devise a myth, ‘The Allegory of the Stone-Pushers’, where I bring together the main elements composing the ontology of the philo-zophoi, underlining the deep existential crisis of the ones whose immortality project is bound to fail. I argue that this interpretation not only uncovers the existential turmoil present in the ancient Greek culture, but even more than that, it is representative of the human condition.