In Twilight of the Idols (1889), Friedrich Nietzsche provocatively accuses philosophers of engaging in what he calls “Egyptianism”—i.e., taking the living, dynamic diversity of things and mummifying them into dead, static concepts.
In this regard, Plato is paradigmatic. His obsession with conceptual purity and the desire to comprehend immutable objects of knowledge, which are stable and unchanging, leads him to take flight of this world of flux. Enlightenment, he argues, is the process of intellectually ascending from this world to the realm of pure ideas (or forms) and assenting to the superior reality of these immutable ideas.
If Plato is the paradigmatic philosopher—if “the love of wisdom” consists in turning one’s gaze away from life and instead seeking to intellectually commune with transcendent ideas in their crystalline purity—then Nietzsche is an anti-philosopher.
But perhaps we should, instead, displace Plato as the paragon of philosophy and acknowledge that Nietzsche’s efforts to achieve a form of “joyful wisdom” that’s fully engaged with life is, or ought to be, a model for all lovers of wisdom.
However we classify him (or whether we even attempt to do so, for such an effort hinges on engaging in a metaphilosophical conceptual analysis, which would, itself, be a form of “Egyptianism”) Nietzsche takes himself to have an important task: the sounding out of idols.
By this, he means the iconoclastic practice of bring forth the assumptions and ideological constructs around which we structure and “give meaning” to our lives, and to take a hammer to them, to smash them to smithereens—or at to at least attempt to do so. This consists in interrogating them, viewing them with suspicion, forcing them to reveal whether they are opposed to a life of engaged vitality.
Everything Nietzsche writes is ultimately centered around his concern for life and how life is lived. He seeks to subject everything of alleged and possible importance to harsh interrogation, especially those things which relate to value and valuation. He seeks to assess whether the horizons within which people live and operate are healthy or diseased. He is, in short, concerned with interrogating social and psychological reality and the human condition.
all healthy morality [i.e., natural morality] is dominated by an instinct of life [and] Anti-natural morality... turns... against the instincts of life... (§4)
Prevailing moral judgments rest on the idolatry of concepts: "Reality,” he points out, “shows us an enchanting wealth of types." In other words, human beings admit of complex variation. Nevertheless, the moralist points to a mummified concept, such as an idealized conception of a person or the human essence, and says, in effect, “this is how one ought to be.” But no living person can ever become such a static thing; the immutable, universal concept of “man” or human nature is taken as that which is most real about us, but Nietzsche views this whole business of conceptualization as decadence—i.e., decline into an unhealthy, diseased orientation to life.