you can't destroy the table-ness

i've been talking to my friend mark lately. we are going to create a course for each other this summer. mark is going to teach me about existentialism and i am going to try to teach him about modern art. i've been reading thus spoke zarathustra (full text available at Project Gutenberg) and mark explained to me last night that a major difference between classical western thought by plato and existentialist thought by nietzsche was their concern with being. plato believed in the idea of perfect forms: that the things in the world were imperfect copies of some higher, perfect ideal. whereas nietzsche, and existentialism in general, call for a return to reality. existentialists say that what is exists in physical form is all that exists. take a table for instance: plato would say that though you can destroy this table you still have the higher, perfect ideal of a table; you can't destroy the table-ness. contrasting this idea, nietzche would say that once you destroy that table, it is gone; there is no perfect table, only the many individual tables we see in reality.

this idea is hardly new to nietzche, aristotle taught similar ideas of reality. nietzche is different in that he uses the position to attack hypocritical religious people. nietzche rejects that they often are concerned only with the ideals of afterlife and therefore view the earth as un-meaningful or even sinful. nietzche calls for a return to reality where people realize that they are on earth and need to work on improving the current reality.

i've only finished reading the first of four parts, so more on this later.