It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that natural philosophy is only a world-exposition and world-arrangement (according to us, if I may say so!) and NOT a world-explanation; but in so far as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded as more—namely, as an explanation. It has eyes and fingers of its own, it has ocular evidence and palpableness of its own: this operates fascinatingly, persuasively, and CONVINCINGLY upon an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes—in fact, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternal popular sensualism. What is clear, what is "explained"? Only that which can be seen and felt—one must pursue every problem thus far.
Even physics is not an explanation of the world; it is merely another interpretation of it (by us!). But what is convincing about physics is its reliance on the senses. Knowledge can be proved through experimentation. Physics is a conviction for the importance of sense data.
Obversely, however, the charm of the Platonic mode of thought, which was an ARISTOCRATIC mode, consisted precisely in RESISTANCE to obvious sense-evidence—perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of them: and this by means of pale, cold, grey conceptional networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses—the mob of the senses, as Plato said.
On the other hand, Platonism was built in retaliation to the obviousness of the senses. Unlike physicists, Platonists wanted to overcome their senses and seek a more eternal truth that was deemed more important. Platonism is the conviction that senses are something to be overcome and the real world lies beyond them.
In this overcoming of the world, and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato, there was an ENJOYMENT different from that which the physicists of today offer us—and likewise the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among the physiological workers, with their principle of the "smallest possible effort," and the greatest possible blunder. "Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do"—that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but ROUGH work to perform.
The Platonists enjoyed living in the unknown, living in accordance not with the physical world, but instead the Forms. Science is grounded on the opposite: “where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do." Physicists enjoy certainty of everything. Platonists enjoy “going beyond” certainty.
Nietzsche doesn't say which understanding-of-the-world is better, but he does hint that the scientific conception of the world will be the better conviction for the "machinists" and “bridge-builders” of the future. It is more utilitarian.
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