21. The last scions and consequences of Platonism in the present:
a) everything that calls itself "ontology" and everything that wants to be, or does not want to be, ontology; even its oppositions—e.g., the one based on a Kantianism—remain within the same realm of conditions for "ontologies."
b) all Christian and non-Christian metaphysics.
c) every theory that adopts "values," "meaning," "ideas," and ideals; likewise, the theories (positivism and biologism) that deny these.
d) any kind of "life"-philosophy, to which the question of being—even in the proper form of the earlier guiding question—remains alien (Dilthey).
e) every single one of those trends that mix up all of the above, teach ideas and values, and at the same time emphasize "existence" ["Existenz"] in the manner of "life"-philosophy. Here the most extreme confusion is raised to a principle, and all genuine thinking and questioning is abandoned.
f) finally, Nietzsche's philosophy, which, precisely because it understands itself as an inversion of Platonism, re-falls into it—through the back door, so to speak. Even where Nietzsche, as a thinker who "goes over," does ultimately twist free from Platonism and from its inversion, he still does not achieve an originary interrogation of the truth of beyng and of the essence of truth, an interrogation that would lead to an overcoming.
22. On the other hand, Nietzsche was the first to recognize the key position of Plato and the bearing of Platonism on the history of the West (ascent of nihilism). More precisely, he had an intimation of the key position of Plato; for Plato's position between pre-Platonic and post-Platonic philosophy becomes visible only if the pre-Platonic is grasped out of itself in a primordial way and not, as in Nietzsche, interpreted Platonically. Nietzsche remained mired in this interpretation because he did not recognize the guiding question as such and did not carry out the transition to the basic question. Yet Nietzsche did (and this for the moment has greater weight) track down Platonism in its most covert forms: Christianity and its secularizations are thoroughly "Platonism for the people."
23. In its overt and covert dominance, Platonism has placed beings as a whole (and in the way they have been considered and been formed during the course of Western history) into a definite condition and has turned definite directions of representation into self-evident ways of "questioning" (cf. above, "transcendence"). That is the genuine impediment to experiencing and leaping into Da-sein, and it is so severe that at first Da-sein is not understood, especially since