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I'd say it depends on which of the 51 individual sections you're reading, as Nietzsche riffs and jazzes and shreds his way from topic to topic. Jesus there are some brutal breakdowns here, and definitely some highlights: "Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. In section 34, for example, Nietzsche explains that anarchists and socialists he uses the terms interchangeably simply enjoy the feeling of complaining, which satisfies a certain revenge they want to take upon the world- therefore it seems, in Nietzsche's conception, that any attempt at social or political reform is just narcissism. In other words: this whatever this happens to be at a given point in time, presumably is just the way it is, and it's pointless to try to change or reform it. I feel that way myself, at times. But isn't this also a kind of masochism, a kind of fatalism? Nietzsche on old age and sickness: To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, ought to entail the profound contempt of society. Physicians, in their turn, ought to be the communicators of this contempt- not prescriptions, but every day a fresh dose of disgust with their patients It would be good job security for Nietzsche too, because even if Biden and Harris win, they can just retain Nietzsche- they can have him say essentially the same things, just with a nicer tone, throw in some rhetorical bullshit about restoring the soul of America- and Nietzsche can provide ideological cover for why they'll never support universal healthcare. Later, Nietzsche continues to express some values that I'm going to be polite and refer to as conservative: I have already For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum. Didn't I read once that Nietzsche's Nazi bitch of a sister altered some of his writing years later in order to make it seem like he would have approved of the Nazis? Is it possible I got one of those copies? The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct of degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labor question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions : first imperative of instinct So here's my question for Nietzsche, and I hope he answers me here on Goodreads. Your book, quite provocative and insightful at times, seems to be about how people worship arbitrary idols without even being conscious of it. But why then do you think your readers should have such reverence for the rule of "instinct"? Why should I have any respect at all for concepts like "tradition, authority and centuries-long responsibility"? And why do you, for that matter? By the time we get to track 11, the outro, What I Owe to the Ancients , it's as if a storm has passed, although there's a sense of lingering danger and tempestuous seas. Nietzsche reiterates the connection between Socrates actually, now he's talking about Plato, but those two fellas had similar ideas, didn't they? Idols, in other words. Nietzsche finishes by re-emphasizing the necessity of offering an ecstatic YES to life, "affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems. I agree that it's good to be adaptable, to work through hardship, and that there's something powerful in the idea of being able to say YES to every experience, to accept everything as material for a creative life. And I can understand why people living in troubled times that would be all of us, now find solace and inspiration in this idea, and in Nietzsche's writing in general. I'm with him just up to the point where that affirmation becomes fatalism, an excuse for keeping things the way they are, and where the ecstatic YES becomes contempt for anyone who doesn't or can't follow suit. Probably doesn't deserve a place in the heavy metal pantheon like Schopenhauer's Forever Baptized in Eternal Fire or Kant's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son , or even Nietzsche's self-titled debut, but an album that's worth getting out of the drawer and giving a re-listen, if it's been a while. View all 8 comments. I intend to write an essay about three of the books written in by Nietzsche: the most explosive, the "crazy" ones. What I have found out, re-reading them, is that Nietzsche wasn't crazy at all when he conceived "The Twilight of Idols" for instance as some psychiatrists claim. His truths are more powerful, deeper and more energetic. There is an incredible tension but also a massive - almost unbelieveable - intuition. In his hidden, occult way pre-psychanalytic , Nietzsche is almost always I intend to write an essay about three of the books written in by Nietzsche: the most explosive, the "crazy" ones. In his hidden, occult way pre-psychanalytic , Nietzsche is almost always right. His truth may be "perverse" but it is nevertheless a strong truth. I'd rather be insane with Nietzsche than "normal" with Kant. However, because Nietzsche has written this books weeks before his mental breakdown, they are somehow mythologically charged. Before experiencing his abyss, the German writer had perhaps the most formidable intelectual adventure of all times: if Zarathustra is Everest, Genealogy of the Morals and the writtings from the fateful are a trip to Moon and Mars. The aforementioned virtual essay of mine will probably emulate Papini's tone from the "Twilight of Philosophers". May 11, Geoff marked it as to-read. Jan 07, Griffin Wilson rated it it was amazing Shelves: ph-modern , z-nietzsche. Most excellent. I could recommend this as a good place to start with Nietzsche. He wrote it at the end of his life and seems to bring a lot of ideas from different works together here: critiques of Plato and his impact on the Western tradition, of Christianity, and of "modernity" and various thinkers it produced along with bits and pieces of his solution. I doubt this chaos was natural, since he spent a lot of time thinking about the format he was about to put it with the Antichrist in one book , but there's no doubt he's the gift of writing. I can't approve all his thoughts, but among this ideas flooding, you can't remain neutral. You'll going to be there trying to rebuild what the flood has already demolished, trying to pick some new materials, strong enough to resist the Hammer of the philosopher.. More precisely: we are never understood — hence our authority. You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third case would be as a fugitive. First question of conscience. Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience. Are you one who looks on? Or one who lends a hand? Or one who looks away and walks off? Third question of conscience. Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know wh You run ahead? One must know what one wants and that one wants. Fourth question of conscience. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Nov 12, lavinia rated it did not like it Shelves: philosophy. I am most likely going to burn in reader's hell for this rating. I never really liked Nietzsche, his style always seems to influence the weak with rebellion, especially teenagers. His anger with Christianity is so big that I believe this guy is responsible for a third of today's atheists. Especially if you're in high school, this book is going to influence you a lot. He focuses on how people trust and value much more their non-sensorial traits and how the real sensors are neglected and considered I am most likely going to burn in reader's hell for this rating. He focuses on how people trust and value much more their non-sensorial traits and how the real sensors are neglected and considered perhaps too shallow he gives the nose as an example. He talks a lot about Christians and they're beliefs in heaven, about how this proofs they're dislike of the real world. He picks on Plato a lot, and later on some german philosophers. Overall, this was a drag to read, with no valuable take-aways for me. Luckily it's a short book, otherwise I would have given up for sure after the first hundred pages. View 1 comment. Sep 29, Ali Gilani rated it it was amazing. Nietzsche writes in a vague prose, and there are multiple interpretations of his texts, but I will make it simpler for me and write my first impressions of the book. I believe it is a great piece of prose. And his aphoristic style is short and curt and as the name of the book suggests, it really feels like someone is pounding you with a hammer. The blows are swift and direct. As I read an English translation much of the lyrical effect, the play on the words is left out, somewhere pointed out by Nietzsche writes in a vague prose, and there are multiple interpretations of his texts, but I will make it simpler for me and write my first impressions of the book. As I read an English translation much of the lyrical effect, the play on the words is left out, somewhere pointed out by footnotes. The book starts with his Maxims, with some of his famous ones there too. There are a lot of pithy aphorisms you will find inside the book chapters as well. But the ones in Maxims and Arrows are standalone. Then comes his chapter on Socrates. And I tend to agree with Nietzsche most of what he writes about Socrates. Imagine a guy who goes to the market, the city center to talk to random people and insult them, make them feel stupid. Socrates was a genius, and he used his genius to insult people. How noble is that? That is the modern day equivalent of trolls on the internet. Some refined reasoning put in to such a use. Nietzsche questions what prompted Socrates to act the way he acted? His own insecurities? His ugliness? A foreigner who could read faces passing through Athens told Socrates that he contained within him every kind of lust and vice. When he analyzes and insults, he is actually questioning the motives of those famous philosophers. A buffoon who got himself to be taken seriously. When you make a lot of enemies, you earn a lot of friends too. And he wanted to die. It was the man himself who forced Athens to give him a death sentence. They try to dehistoricize, and try to view from the viewpoint of eternity. We can witness this today as well, people analyzing events without the context of that era. Pedophilia was considered normal once, to quote an example. Then he goes on to critique apparent and real world distinction: the read world according to Plato is the perfect world of ideas, and according to Christianity the life after death. So he gives his four propositions, the first one of them is this apparent world is real, its apparent qualities actually justifies and establishes its reality. Another kind of reality is not demonstrable. Life after death is not demonstrable. They are fantasies. Nietzsche comes out as a stark realist and cuts out all the nonsense. A kind of castration in which you decapacitate the man of his passions. The man is weakened. Instead of spiritualizing, beautifying and deifying a passion, the passion is exterminated. Hostile to life. A castration. In The Four Great Errors, the chapter that follows, Neitzsche turns into a logician and gives lessons about errors of confusing cause and consequence, false causality, imaginary causes, and their psychological explanations. He then chucks the entire realm of morality and religion under the concepts of imaginary causes. He analyzes free will, and how it has given approval for the priests to hold people accountable and give them punishment or render them with guilt. In the end, he denies Accountability. He finds the pagan practice of caste system more solid, more Aryan, more likely to produce great men than Christian morality. At the end he mentions how the creators of moral orders, did not feel pangs of conscience to tell lies. They never doubted their right to tell lies. Whether Manu, Plato, Confucius or any other religious or moral authority, they told lies. He concludes that every code to make men moral had an immoral start. He also recommends learning to see, to think and to write. To see is to hold back quick judgment, a knee-jerk reaction. He talks about literary figures, criticizes a lot many and appraises a few. Some are obscure and maybe popular back then like Sainte Bueve, George Sand etc. Some paragraphs are brilliant pieces of writing and they have either loose connections or none at all. It too has a function: To glorify, to select, to praise, to highlight and to strengthen or weaken certain valuations. In many ways, Nietzsche expounds his existential views. Of power, of freedom, of limitations. His conception of freedom is power. More power makes you more free. It removes the impediments, the hurdles out of your way. They hold too much energy in them. He praises Sallust, from whom he owes his aphoristic style. And Thucydides. He finds Plato boring, and for good reason. Celebrates the Ancient practices of affirming life by deifying sex and birth rather than holding them sinful by later Christian morality. Aug 27, Taylor Lee rated it liked it Shelves: german , philosophy. The aphoristic format is sometimes fatiguing, but this reads like a compendium of Nietzschean wit and insight. The fragmented nature of the work can be disorienting. Mar 17, Dario added it Shelves: philosophy. Nietzsche wrote 6 books in , most of them in the latter half of the year. In January he suffered a mental breakdown allegedly defending a horse that was being flogged in Turin. Excluding a few letters, he never wrote again. He spent the remaining 11 years of his life in the care of various relatives and psychiatrists before dying in at the age of Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer was to be one of his last works. At the time of Twilight Nietzsche was Nietzsche wrote 6 books in , most of them in the latter half of the year. At the time of Twilight Nietzsche was just starting to amass a humble readership for the first time. He saw this book functioning somewhat as an introduction to his philosophy. Its manner is fast-paced and its structure eclectic. Formally speaking, the book jumps all over the place, including aphorisms, poems, monographs, as well as a huge range of chapter sizes, ranging from 1 page to odd pages. Nietzsche is having a lot of fun. He gleefully tears across all number of philosophers, historians, philologists, writers, etc. In this most famous of Western philosophers Nietzsche sees the epitome of decadence, degeneration. Socrates inspired the ancient Greeks so fervently precisely because he represented to the highest degree the decay of their instincts, their nobler instincts, but also, the way out. The ancient Greece of 'reason' was a disaster. Or at least, born of disaster. This disaster was the degeneration of their instincts, the becoming-self-destructive of their instincts. The contradiction and confusion of the instincts is the sign or symptom of decadence par excellence. And Nietzsche is insistent on his symptomatology as methodology. The late Nietzsche deploys physiology and psychology as philosophical tools to devastating effect. For Nietzsche, we have to go much further back before we get to the truly magnificent Greece. This , is the Greece of Dionysus. Dionysianism is the intoxicating art of the affirmation of multiplicity, the affirmation of life itself. The Dionysian is a festival, it is orgiastic; it is that true freedom of spirit that is strong enough to say a resounding yes to life and all that it produces, the bellowing yes to becoming, to the "innocence of becoming"; the creator and destroyer of values who cannot help but bear the swollen will of millennia and tear humanity forward into destiny. To where, exactly? Man is a bridge! Creators are those who have become child, and to become child you must be reborn, and to be reborn means to face the tragic, to face those enemies who may even seem insurmountable. This indeed is what Nietzsche finds in his own self-reflection upon the birth of tragedy: not a catharsis, but a boundless affirmation! This starts off with some almost funny something even vaguely resembling humor is not something you expect to see in a Nietzsche book observations from Nietzsche and goes from there into his critiques of Socrates. He later goes into critiques and observations about other philosophers, as well as critiquing Germans and Germany. This book has plenty of what I normally like and dislike about Nietzsche. Dislike, sometimes reading his work is about as exciting as watching paint dry and he comes off This starts off with some almost funny something even vaguely resembling humor is not something you expect to see in a Nietzsche book observations from Nietzsche and goes from there into his critiques of Socrates. Dislike, sometimes reading his work is about as exciting as watching paint dry and he comes off personality wise as way too anal retentive, dogmatic to his own worldview and humorless. He reminds me of the current wave of militant atheists. Dogmatic atheism is the trendy new system created religion in case you haven't noticed. What I like about Nietzsche, the creed of self improvement and the anti-Christianity stuff, is here in abundance. Like in most of his work between pages of boredom you get instances of brilliance such as the following from Twilight of the Idols when talking about what Christianity did to the great "Teutonic Blonde Beast" he say Christianity made him "sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself, full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy". In other words he lost his healthy Pagan Odinic worldview and became a psychological and spiritual Jew. Jun 26, Nat Smith rated it really liked it. Subtitled 'how to philosophise with a hammer', Nietzsche wrote this as a synopsis of his philosophy in a flurry of productivity shortly before his descent into madness in In short, Nietzsche launches an assault on much of his zeitgeist, especially Judeo- Christian morality and the exaltation of rationality as the sole domain of wisdom. I found it an exhilarating read: Nietzsche has this malice to his writing that never fails to provoke - utterly scathing stuff. Aside from the blood sport, h Subtitled 'how to philosophise with a hammer', Nietzsche wrote this as a synopsis of his philosophy in a flurry of productivity shortly before his descent into madness in Aside from the blood sport, his critique of 'thinking errors' prompted plenty of reflection too. Some drawbacks: some sections criticise subjects I only have a superficial knowledge of, so I skipped through these Philology, some obscure Germand and French writers. There are some obvious contradictions in his writing which he doesn't acknowledge or resolve he tears Socrates a new one, but Socrates' death is utterly compatible with Nietzsche's philosophy. In addition, Nietzsche's tone frequently dips into plain arrogance. On the one hand, it suits his anti-hero writing style nicely. On the other, it's just a bit tasteless. I'm inclined perhaps out of loyalty to put it down to his deteriorating mental health: his soon-to-be-written autobiography ecce homo is a curious balance of satire and megalomania, and as is normal for psychotics he believed himself to be a deity after his mental breakdown. Nevertheless, if you want an accessible and compelling overview of Nietzsche's world, look no further. Apr 06, Mark rated it liked it. Hysterically irritated and contemptuous, this book of aphoristic observations and short philosophical essays is by turns incisive, obvious, witty, morose and self-congratulatory. Nietzsche here is like a hungover Voltaire the morning after a brawl at a gentleman's club. He's relentlessly dour, and his arguments seem at first like a bracing philosophical slap, then like a hilarious rant at a Bohemian open-mike night and finally like a tiresome uncle's after-dinner wheedling. The number of stars i Hysterically irritated and contemptuous, this book of aphoristic observations and short philosophical essays is by turns incisive, obvious, witty, morose and self-congratulatory. The number of stars is somewhat arbitrary, because rating such a book by 20 percent increments seems beside the point, but it gets middle of the road marks because, as a social philosophy, these tenets can be applied only by individuals against the rest of society, and that can hardly be considered a great triumph unless you're in a biker gang. On the other hand, it's a good pocketbook antidote to self-righteous middle-class religious nattering, especially in the event that you feel personally put-upon by such. Jan 09, Sandro Tarkhan-mouravi rated it really liked it. Purely as a literary work, Twilight of the Idols is a brilliant text - in his imaginative mastery of language Nietzsche is hardly surpassed by any writer of fiction. This is however not a novel but a philosophical text, written unhesitatingly in the first person, and one is forced to judge it on substance. Nietzsche's way of presenting his worldview is hardly thorough or systematic. Instead he is launching us on a wild, twisting path of outstandingly brilliant insights alternating with most horrib Purely as a literary work, Twilight of the Idols is a brilliant text - in his imaginative mastery of language Nietzsche is hardly surpassed by any writer of fiction. Instead he is launching us on a wild, twisting path of outstandingly brilliant insights alternating with most horrible ideas - each expressed pithily and memorably, yet also in an utterly presumptuous and sometimes even preposterous manner. Consequently, this book can be both a source of positive empowerment and inspiration or a terrible influence - or merely repel the reader through its eccentricity. One should read it armed both with exceptional openness and a hammer of skepticism. To summarize it all: what a splendid genius, what a dangerous madman. Philosophize with a Hammer!!! Love this concept because Nietzsche is usually vilified by those who either have never read his work or don't appreciate what he was trying to do. First and foremost Nietzsche is a penultimate cultural critic. He is trying to smash through powerfully entrenched paradigms in order that Westerners might better understand themselves. It is obvious that the focus of the majority of his angst, the recently united Kingdom of Germany s , comes from a deep frustration r Philosophize with a Hammer!!! It is obvious that the focus of the majority of his angst, the recently united Kingdom of Germany s , comes from a deep frustration rooted in a nostalgic love for the pre-united German principalities. Contextually this is crucial to understanding his near vitriolic rants about the decline of high culture. Reading between the lines one can tell he believes the German principalities were much richer culturally through their diversity and infighting than a united Germany. To set the stage for how he believes then modern Germany had begun to decay he asserts it started with the Greeks, specifically Plato and Socrates. Rather than praising them, he believes that Plato and Socrates were the proverbial nail in the coffin to Greek culture by denigrating the Greek values of excellence into rationalism. Rationalism facilitates the process of flipping values or transvaluation, where a culture shifts from one set of values to another. Socrates introduced rationalism, which is why the Athenians charged him with poisoning the minds of Athenian youth. To a certain extent, this accusation is true, rationalism allowed for the Greeks to slowly migrate away from their 'will to power' that infuses life with it's vitality and living towards the abstraction of 'pure forms'. That the 'real' life existed somewhere out their beyond this messy world of the physical senses. The Romans explode onto the scene with their passion for 'will to power' not a huge fan of that term as I don't think it accurately conveys what most think it means and their value is strength. This creates the likes of Caesar and many of his contemporaries which Nietzsche praises. He thinks the love of life is why the Romans became both a destructive and creative force across the European landscape. Christianity arrives on the European stage through Rome and it not only adopts Platonism, it moralizes it. This is another example of Nietzsche's Transvaluation, where the Roman values of love of life as it is now is turned into contempt for living. Armed with Platonist ideology, Christianity then begins to worship not this life but the life to come, Heaven. This life is the 'veil of tears', where humans are sinners and always fall short of the Platonist ideal of the "eternal true ideal', God. This warping of values causes Christianity to sap Culture of it's vitality. Now Nietzsche boldly challenges Christianity's culture only as far as it fosters contempt for this life. He believes that life is meant for passionate living, even if it is all an illusion, it is meant to be cherished not through hedonism but through presence. Rather than have rich diverse competing cultures like the Greek City States of old before the Peloponnesian war, Germany had become conquered by it's Sparta equivalent, Prussia. United Germany under the Prussian dynasty started the process of cannibalizing differences espousing a revitalized Platonized Christianity under Lutheranism. Feb 28, Thrasymachus rated it liked it Shelves: philosophy , owned. Instead, he recognizes that his own philosophical program would be neither as effective or necessary without it. If his enemy the Church denies the "instincts of life," this helps him to develop a position that affirms them. Using theological language, Nietzsche insists that the real " blasphemy " is the Christian "rebellion against life. Nietzsche concludes that insisting people ought to be one way and not another leads to a form of bigotry that devalues the goodness of human diversity, the "enchanting wealth of types. Ultimately, Nietzsche concludes that it is "immoralists" such as himself who have the highest respect for inherent worth of individuals because they do not value one person's approach to life over any others. In the chapter The Four Great Errors , he suggests that people, especially Christians, confuse the effect for the cause, and that they project the human ego and subjectivity on to other things, thereby creating the illusionary concept of being , and therefore also of the thing-in-itself and God. In reality, motive or intention is "an accompaniment to an act" [9] rather than the cause of that act. By removing causal agency based on free, conscious will, Nietzsche critiques the ethics of accountability, suggesting that everything is necessary in a whole that can neither be judged nor condemned, because there is nothing outside of it. Men were thought of as free so that they could become guilty : consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness Today, when we have started to move in the reverse direction, when we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with 'punishment' and 'guilt' by means of the concept of the 'moral world-order'. Christianity is a hangman's metaphysics. The Four Great Errors. In this passage, Nietzsche proclaims his lack of belief of an objective morality, stating that there is no such thing as moral fact. With this information, he lists two examples of cases where moralization of mankind was attempted, despite the lack of complete moral truth. The people pushing for this morality are called 'improvers' by Nietzsche, the quotes representing the fact that these certain people fail at their goal of improving man. The first of these examples is that of religion. In this example, Nietzsche tells a fictional story of a priest who converts a man to Christianity , in order to keep him moral. However, his man eventually falls into basic human instinct such as lust, and is thus labeled as a sinner. Afterwards, the man is full of hatred, and is ostracized by others. The priest in this story represents the 'improver,' as he attempts to moralize someone, but only makes the man's life miserable. The second of these examples is that of the caste system in India. This system made an attempt of moralizing man by method of demoting and dehumanizing the Dalit who were at the very bottom of society. The 'improvers' in this scenario are those who perpetuate the caste system, and contribute to the dehumanization of the Dalit for the goal of moralization. In examining German society of his day, Nietzsche attributes any advantage Germans hold over other European countries to basic ethical virtues and not to any cultural sophistication. Nietzsche attributes the decline he sees in the sophistication in German thought to prioritizing politics over the intellect. The state and culture are in tension because one of the pair thrives at the expense of the other. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political [13]. Nietzsche also attributes this decline in the German intellect to problems he saw in higher education in his day. First, Nietzsche calls into question the qualifications of college instructors, insisting on the need for "educators who are themselves educated. Second, he is highly critical of opening colleges and universities to all classes of society, because when stripped of its "privilege," the quality of higher education declines. Great and fine things can never be common property. In the longest chapter of the book, Nietzsche examines a variety of cultural figures of his day. He also makes a number of psychological observations about what leads to adopting different attitudes about life. Nietzsche criticizes Plato, accusing him of "over-morality" and calling him an "exalted swindle. He argues against what he sees as Plato's hatred of life to argue that humans need to value life despite the suffering. He refers to the Dionysian Mysteries to argue that we need to answer a triumphant yes to life, and that even pain is holy. He also refers to the Eternal Recurrence , his thought experiment that asks if you would be happy if you found out you had to live the same life over and over down to the last detail unknowingly Nietzsche thinks the answer should be yes , to encourage people to embrace and celebrate life. Nietzsche believes that to be oneself is "the eternal joy of becoming. Nietzsche's original line "From life's school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger" has been referenced many times. Gordon Liddy , former assistant to President Richard Nixon , quoted Nietzsche when he got released from prison. Marilyn Manson , in his song " Leave A Scar " , paraphrases Nietzsche to make a different point: "whatever doesn't kill you is gonna' leave a scar. The Joker in the movie The Dark Knight uses this phrase in a slightly altered way "Whatever doesn't kill you, simply makes you stranger! From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Book by Friedrich Nietzsche. For other uses, see Twilight of the Idols disambiguation. This article appears to contain trivial, minor, or unrelated references to popular culture. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture, providing citations to reliable, secondary sources , rather than simply listing appearances. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Twilight of the Idols, by Friedrich Nietzsche.

The errors exposed in these [Pg ix] sections have a tradition of two thousand years behind them; and only a fantastic dreamer could expect them to be eradicated by a mere casual study of these pages. Indeed, Nietzsche himself looked forward only to a gradual change in the general view of the questions he discussed; he knew only too well what the conversion of "light heads" was worth, and what kind of man would probably be the first to rush into his arms; and, grand psychologist that he was, he guarded himself beforehand against bad company by means of his famous warning: —"The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it. To the aspiring student of Nietzsche, however, it ought not to be necessary to become an immediate convert in order to be interested in the treasure of thought which Nietzsche here lavishes upon us. For such a man it will be quite difficult enough to regard the questions raised in this work as actual problems. Once, however, he has succeeded in doing this, and has given his imagination time to play round these questions as problems, the particular turn or twist that Nietzsche gives to their elucidation, may then perhaps strike him, not only as valuable, but as absolutely necessary. You even crush some to death, there are too many of them. And what are these truths? They are things that are not yet held to be true. They are the utterances of a man who, as a single exception, escaped for a [Pg x] while the general insanity of Europe, with its blind idealism in the midst of squalor, with its unscrupulous praise of so-called "Progress" while it stood knee-deep in the belittlement of "Man," and with its vulgar levity in the face of effeminacy and decay;—they are the utterances of one who voiced the hopes, the aims, and the realities of another world, not of an ideal world, not of a world beyond, but of a real world, of this world regenerated and reorganised upon a sounder, a more virile, and a more orderly basis,—in fact, of a perfectly possible world, one that has already existed in the past, and could exist again, if only the stupendous revolution of a transvaluation of all values were made possible. This then is the nature of the truths uttered by this one sane man in the whole of Europe at the end of last century; and when, owing to his unequal struggle against the overwhelming hostile forces of his time, his highly sensitive personality was at last forced to surrender itself to the enemy and become one with them—that is to say, insane! Nietzsche must have started upon the "Antichrist," immediately after having dispatched the "Idle Hours of a Psychologist" to the printers, and the work appears to have been finished at the end of September It was intended by Nietzsche to form the first book of a large work entitled "The Transvaluation of all Values"; but, though this work was never completed, we can form some idea [Pg xi] from the substance of the "Antichrist" and from the titles of the remaining three books, which alas! These titles are:—Book II. The Free Spirit. A Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement. Book III. The Immoralist. Book IV. The Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence. Nietzsche calls this book "An Attempted Criticism of Christianity. Be this as it may, there is the solution of a certain profound problem in this book, which, while it is the key to all Nietzscheism, is also the justification and the sanctification of Nietzsche's cause. The problem stated quite plainly is this: " To what end did Christianity avail itself of falsehood? Many readers of this amazing little work, who happen to be acquainted with Nietzsche's doctrine of Art and of Ruling, will probably feel slightly confused at the constant deprecation of falsehood, of deception, and of arbitrary make-believe, which seems to run through this book like a litany in praise of a certain Absolute Truth. Remembering Nietzsche's utterance in volume ii. Thus it is necessary that something should be assumed to be true, not that it is true;"— remembering these words, as I say, the reader may stand somewhat aghast before all those passages in the second half of this volume, where the very falsehoods of Christianity, its assumptions, its unwarrantable claims to Truth, are declared to be pernicious, base and corrupt. Again and again, if we commit the error of supposing that Nietzsche believed in a truth that was absolute, we shall find throughout his works reasons for charging him with apparently the very same crimes that he here lays at the door of Christianity. What then is the explanation of his seeming inconsistency? It is simple enough. Nietzsche's charge of falsehood against Christianity is not a moral one,—in fact it may be taken as a general rule that Nietzsche scrupulously avoids making moral charges, and that he emains throughout faithful to his position Beyond Good and Evil see, for instance Aph. A man who maintained that "truth is that form of error which enables a particular species to prevail," could not make a moral charge of falsehood against any one, or any institution; but he could do so from another standpoint He could well say, for instance, "falsehood is that kind of error which causes a particular species to degenerate and to decay. Thus the fact that Christianity "lied" becomes a subject of alarm to Nietzsche, not owing to the fact that it is immoral to lie, but because in this particular [Pg xiii] instance, the lie was harmful, hostile to life, and dangerous to humanity; for "a belief might be false and yet life-preserving" Beyond Good and Evil, pp. Suppose, therefore, we say with Nietzsche that there is no absolute truth, but that all that has been true in the past which has been the means of making the "plant man flourish best"—or, since the meaning of "best" is open to some debate, let us say, flourish in a Nietzschean sense, that is to say, thanks to a mastery of life, and to a preponderance of all those qualities which say yea to existence, and which suggest no flight from this world and all its pleasure and pain. And suppose we add that, wherever we may find the plant man flourishing, in this sense, we should there suspect the existence of truth? With these preparatory remarks we are now prepared to read aphorism 56 with a complete understanding of what Nietzsche means, and to recognise in this particular aphorism the key to the whole of Nietzsche's attitude towards Christianity. It is at once a solution of our problem, and a justification of its author's position. Naturally, it still remains open to Nietzsche's opponents to argue, if they choose, that man has flourished best under the sway of nihilistic religions—religions which deny life,—and that consequently the falsehoods of Christianity are not only warrantable but also in the highest degree blessed; but, in any case, the aphorism in [Pg xiv] question completely exonerates Nietzsche from a charge of inconsistency in the use of the terms "truth" and "falsehood" throughout his works, and it moreover settles once and for all the exact altitude from which our author looked down upon the religions of the world, not only to criticise them, but also to place them in the order of their merit as disciplinary systems aiming at the cultivation of particular types of men. Nietzsche says in aphorism 56 :—"After all, the question is, to what end are falsehoods perpetrated? The fact that, in Christianity, 'holy' ends are entirely absent, constitutes my objection to the means it employs. Its ends are only bad ends: the poisoning, the calumniation and the denial of life, the contempt of the body, the degradation and self-pollution of man by virtue of the concept sin,—consequently its means are bad as well. Thus, to repeat it once more, it is not because Christianity availed itself of all kinds of lies that Nietzsche condemns it; for the Book of Manu— which he admires—is just as full of falsehood as the Semitic Book of Laws; but, in the Book of Manu the lies are calculated to preserve and to create a strong and noble type of man, whereas in Christianity the opposite type was the aim,—an aim which has been achieved in a manner far exceeding even the expectations of the faithful. This then is the main argument of the book and its conclusion; but, in the course of the general elaboration of this argument, many important side-issues are touched upon and developed, wherein Nietzsche reveals himself as something very much [Pg xv] more valuable than a mere iconoclast. Of course, on every page of his philosophy,—whatever his enemies may maintain to the contrary,—he never once ceases to construct, since he is incessantly enumerating and emphasising those qualities and types which he fain would rear, as against those he fain would see destroyed; but it is in aphorism 57 of this book that Nietzsche makes the plainest and most complete statement of his actual taste in Sociology, and it is upon this aphorism that all his followers and disciples will ultimately have to build, if Nietzscheism is ever to become something more than a merely intellectual movement. To maintain a cheerful attitude of mind in the midst of a gloomy and exceedingly responsible task, is no slight artistic feat. And yet, what could be more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce. Surplus power, alone, is the proof of power. This end justifies every means, every event on the road to it is a windfall. Above all war. War has always been the great policy of all spirits who have penetrated too far into themselves or who have grown too deep; a wound stimulates the recuperative powers. For many years, a maxim, the origin of which I withhold from learned curiosity, has been my motto:. At other times another means of recovery which is even more to my taste, is to cross-examine idols. There are more idols than realities in the world: [Pg xviii] this constitutes my "evil eye" for this world: it is also my "evil ear. Even this treatise—as its title shows—is above all a recreation, a ray of sunshine, a leap sideways of a psychologist in his leisure moments. Maybe, too, a new war? And are we again cross-examining new idols? This little work is a great declaration of war; and with regard to the cross- examining of idols, this time it is not the idols of the age but eternal idols which are here struck with a hammer as with a tuning fork,—there are certainly no idols which are older, more convinced, and more inflated. Neither are there any more hollow. This does not alter the fact that they are believed in more than any others, besides they are never called idols,—at least, not the most exalted among their number. Aristotle says that in order to live alone, a man must be either an animal or a god. The third alternative is lacking: a man must be both—a philosopher. A man recovers best from his exceptional nature—his intellectuality—by giving his animal instincts a chance. A man should not play the coward to his deeds. He should not repudiate them once he has performed them. Pangs of conscience are indecent. Can a donkey be tragic? This is the case of the Philosopher. If a man knows the wherefore of his existence, then the manner of it can take care of itself. Man does not aspire to happiness; only the Englishman does that. Art thou looking for something? Thou [Pg 3] wouldst fain multiply thyself tenfold, a hundredfold? Thou seekest followers? Seek ciphers! Posthumous men, like myself, are not so well understood as men who reflect their age, but they are heard with more respect. In plain English: we are never understood—hence our authority. Among women. Oh, you do not know truth! Is it not an outrage on all our pudeurs? There is an artist after my own heart, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art — panem et Circem. He who knows not how to plant his will in things, at least endows them with some meaning: that is to say, he believes that a will is already present in them. A principle of faith. Ye chose virtue and the heaving breast, and at the same time ye squint covetously at the advantages of the unscrupulous. The perfect woman perpetrates literature as if it were a petty vice: as an experiment, en passant, [Pg 4] and looking about her all the while to see whether anybody is noticing her, hoping that somebody is noticing her. One should adopt only those situations in which one is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand—or escape. By seeking the beginnings of things, a man becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards: in the end he also believes backwards. Contentment preserves one even from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well-dressed ever caught cold? Man thinks woman profound—why? Because he can never fathom her depths. Woman is not even shallow. When woman possesses masculine virtues, she is enough to make you run away. When she possesses no masculine virtues, she herself runs away. What good teeth it must have had! And to-day, what is amiss? Errors of haste are seldom committed singly. The first time a man always docs too much. And precisely on that account he commits a second error, and then he does too little. The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden [Pg 6] upon again. In the language of morality: Humility. There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humour; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie What trifles constitute happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German imagines even God as a songster. Here I have got you, you nihilist! A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value. There are times when we psychologists are like horses, and grow fretful. We see our own shadow rise and fall before us. The psychologist must look away from himself if he wishes to see anything at all. Do we immoralists injure virtue in any way? Just as little as the anarchists injure royalty. Only since they have been shot at do princes sit firmly on their thrones once more. Moral: morality must be shot at. Thou runnest ahead? A third alternative would be the fugitive First question of conscience. Art thou genuine or art thou only an actor? Art thou a representative or the thing represented, itself? Finally, art thou perhaps simply a copy of an actor? Second question of conscience. The disappointed man speaks: —I sought for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideal. Art thou one who looks on, or one who puts his own shoulder to the wheel? Third question of conscience. Wilt thou go in company, or lead, or go by thyself? A man should know what he desires, and that he desires something. They were but rungs in my ladder, on them I made my ascent:—to that end I had to go beyond them. But they imagined that I wanted to lay myself to rest upon them. What matters it whether I am acknowledged to be right! I am much too right. And he who laughs best to-day, will also laugh last. Wherever people sing thou canst safely settle down without a qualm as to what the general faith of the land may be Wherever people sing, no man is ever robbed; rascals have no songs. Popular tradition, however, renders the lines thus:—. In all ages the wisest have always agreed in their V judgment of life: it is no good. At all times and places the same words have been on their lips,—words full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of hostility to life. What does that prove? What does it point to? Formerly people would have said —oh, it has been said, and loudly enough too; by our Pessimists loudest of all! The consensus sapientium is a proof of truth. May we do so? These great sages of all periods should first be examined more closely! Is it possible that they were, everyone of them, a little shaky on their legs, effete, rocky, decadent? Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth after the manner of a crow attracted by a slight smell of carrion? This irreverent belief that the great sages were decadent types, first occurred to me precisely in regard to that case concerning which both learned [Pg 10] and vulgar prejudice was most opposed to my view I recognised Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decline, as instruments in the disintegration of Hellas, as pseudo-Greek, as anti-Greek "The Birth of Tragedy," That consensus sapientium, as I perceived ever more and more clearly, did not in the least prove that they were right in the matter on which they agreed. It proved rather that these sages themselves must have been alike in some physiological particular, in order to assume the same negative attitude towards life—in order to be bound to assume that attitude. After all, judgments and valuations of life, whether for or against, cannot be true: their only value lies in the fact that they are symptoms; they can be considered only as symptoms,— per se such judgments are nonsense. You must therefore endeavour by all means to reach out and try to grasp this astonishingly subtle axiom, that the value of life cannot be estimated. A living man cannot do so, because he is a contending party, or rather the very object in the dispute, and not a judge; nor can a dead man estimate it—for other reasons. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life, is almost an objection against him, a note of interrogation set against his wisdom—a lack of wisdom. Is it possible that all these great sages were not only decadents, but that they were not even wise? Let me however return to the problem of Socrates. To judge from his origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest of the low: Socrates was mob. You know, and you can still see it for yourself, how ugly [Pg 11] he was. But ugliness, which in itself is an objection, was almost a refutation among the Greeks. Was Socrates really a Greek? Ugliness is not infrequently the expression of thwarted development, or of development arrested by crossing. In other cases it appears as a decadent development. The anthropologists among the criminal specialists declare that I the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. But the criminal is a decadent? While on his way through Athens a certain foreigner who was no fool at judging by looks, told Socrates to his face that he was a monster, that his body harboured all the worst vices and passions. And Socrates replied simply: "You know me, sir! Not only are the acknowledged wildness and anarchy of Socrates' instincts indicative of decadence, but also that preponderance of the logical faculties and that malignity of the misshapen which was his special characteristic. Neither should we forget those aural delusions which were religiously interpreted as "the demon of Socrates. With Socrates Greek taste veers round in favour of dialectics: what actually occurs? In the first place a noble taste is vanquished: with dialectics the mob comes to the top. Before Socrates' time, dialectical manners were avoided in good society: they were regarded as bad manners, they were compromising. Young men were cautioned against them. All such proffering of one's reasons was looked upon with suspicion. Honest things like honest men do not carry their reasons on their sleeve in such fashion. It is not good form to make a show of everything. That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much. Wherever authority still belongs to good usage, wherever men do not prove but command, the dialectician is regarded as a sort of clown. People laugh at him, they do not take him seriously. Socrates was a clown who succeeded in making men take him seriously: what then was the matter? A man resorts to dialectics only when he has no other means to hand. People know that they excite suspicion with it and that it is not very convincing. Nothing is more easily dispelled than a dialectical effect: this is proved by the experience of every [Pg 13] gathering in which discussions are held. It can be only the last defence of those who have no other weapons. One must require to extort one's right, otherwise one makes no use of it. That is why the Jews were dialecticians. Reynard the Fox was a dialectician: what? Is the Socratic irony an expression of revolt, of mob resentment? Does Socrates, as a creature suffering under oppression, enjoy his innate ferocity in the knife-thrusts of the syllogism? Does he wreak his revenge on the noblemen he fascinates? The dialectician cripples the intellect of his opponent. Can it be that dialectics was only a form of revenge in Socrates? I have given you to understand in what way Socrates was able to repel: now it is all the more necessary to explain how he fascinated. He fascinated by appealing to the combative instinct of the Greeks,—he introduced a variation into the contests between men and youths. Socrates was also a great erotic. But Socrates divined still more. He saw right through his noble Athenians; he perceived that his case, his peculiar case, was no exception even in his time. The same kind of degeneracy was silently preparing itself everywhere: ancient Athens was dying out. And Socrates understood that the whole world needed him,—his means, his remedy, his special artifice for self-preservation. Everywhere the instincts were in a state of anarchy; everywhere people were within an ace of excess: the monstrum in animo was the general danger. His case was at bottom only the extreme and most apparent example of a state of distress which was beginning to be general: that state in which no one was able to master himself and in which the instincts turned one against the other. As the extreme example of this state, he fascinated—his terrifying ugliness made him conspicuous to every eye: it is quite obvious that he fascinated still more as a reply, as a solution, as an apparent cure of this case. When a man finds it necessary, as Socrates did, to create a tyrant out of reason, there is no small [Pg 15] danger that something else wishes to play the tyrant. Reason was then discovered as a saviour; neither Socrates nor his "patients" were at liberty to be rational or not, as they pleased; at that time it was de rigueur, it had become a last shift. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought plunges into reason, betrays a critical condition of things: men were in danger; there were only two alternatives: either perish or else be absurdly rational. The moral bias of Greek philosophy from Plato onward, is the outcome of a pathological condition, as is also its appreciation of dialectics. We must at all costs be clever, precise, clear: all yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards. I have now explained how Socrates fascinated: he seemed to be a doctor, a Saviour. Is it necessary to expose the errors which lay in his faith in "reason at any price"? They cannot thus extricate themselves; that which they choose as a means, as the road to salvation, is in itself again only an expression of degeneration—they only modify its mode of manifesting itself: they do not abolish it Socrates was a misunderstanding. The whole of the morality of amelioration—that of Christianity as well—was a misunderstanding. The most blinding light [Pg 16] of day: reason at any price; life made clear, cold, cautious, conscious, without instincts, opposed to the instincts, was in itself only a disease, another kind of disease—and by no means a return to "virtue," to "health," and to happiness. To be obliged to fight the instincts—this is the formula of degeneration: as long as life is in the ascending line, happiness is the same as instinct. Did he confess this to himself in the end, in the wisdom of his courage before death. Socrates wished to die. Not Athens, but his own hand gave him the draught of hemlock; he drove Athens to the poisoned cup. Socrates himself has only been ill a long while. This passage alludes to the latter, Aphorism 45, p. You ask me what all idiosyncrasy is in philosophers? For instance their lack of the historical sense, their hatred even of the idea of Becoming, their Egyptianism. All the ideas that philosophers have treated for thousands of years, have been mummied concepts; nothing real has ever come out of their hands alive. These idolaters of concepts merely kill and stuff things when they worship,—they threaten the life of everything they adore. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are in their opinion objections,—even refutations. That which is cannot evolve; that which evolves is not. Now all of them believe, and even with desperation, in Being. But, as they cannot lay hold of it, they try to discover reasons why this privilege is withheld from them. Moral: we must get rid of the deception of the senses, of Becoming, of history, of [Pg 18] falsehood. Moral: we must say "no" to everything in which the senses believet to all the rest of mankind: all that belongs to the "people. With a feeling of great reverence I except the name of Heraclitus. If the rest of the philosophic gang rejected the evidences of the senses, because the latter revealed a state of multifariousness and change, he rejected the same evidence because it revealed things as if they possessed permanence and unity. Even Heraclitus did an injustice to the senses. The latter lie neither as the Eleatics believed them to lie, nor as he believed them to lie,—they do not He at all. The interpretations we give to their evidence is what first introduces falsehood into it; for instance the He of unity, the lie of matter, of substance and of permanence. Reason is the cause of our falsifying the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show us a state of Becoming, of transiency, and of change, they do not lie. But in declaring that Being was an empty illusion, Heraclitus will remain eternally right The "apparent" world is the only world: the "true world" is no more than a false adjunct thereto. And what delicate instruments of observation we have in our senses! This human nose, for instance, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is, for the present, the most finely adjusted instrument at our disposal: it is able to register even such slight changes of movement as the spectroscope would be unable to record. Our scientific triumphs at the present day extend precisely so far as we have accepted the evidence of our senses,—as we have sharpened and armed them, and learned to follow them up to the end. What remains is abortive and not yet science—that is to say, metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology, or formal science, or a doctrine of symbols, like logic and its applied form mathematics. In all these things reality does not come into consideration at all, even as a problem; just as little as does the question concerning the general value of such a convention of symbols as logic. The other idiosyncrasy of philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in confusing the last and the first things. They place that which makes its appearance last—unfortunately! This again is only their manner of expressing their veneration: the highest thing must not have grown out of the lowest, it must not have grown at all Moral: everything of the first rank must be [Pg 20] causa sui. To have been derived from something else, is as good as an objection, it sets the value of a thing in question. All superior values are of the first rank, all the highest concepts—that of Being, of the Absolute, of Goodness, of Truth, and of Perfection; all these things cannot have been evolved, they must therefore be causa sui. All these things cannot however be unlike one another, they cannot be opposed to one another. Thus they attain to their stupendous concept "God. Fancy humanity having to take the brain diseases of morbid cobweb-spinners seriously! Formerly people regarded change and evolution in general as the proof of appearance, as a sign of the fact that something must be there that leads us astray. To- day, on the other hand, we realise that precisely as far as the rational bias forces us to postulate unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, materiality and being, we are in a measure involved in error, driven necessarily to error; however certain we may feel, as the result of a strict examination of the matter, that the error lies here. It is just the same here as with the motion of the sun: In its case it was our eyes that were wrong; in the matter of the concepts above mentioned it is our language itself that pleads [Pg 21] most constantly in their favour. In its origin language belongs to an age of the most rudimentary forms of psychology: if we try to conceive of the first conditions of the metaphysics of language, i. For here, the doer and his deed are seen in all circumstances, will is believed in as a cause in general; the ego is taken for granted, the ego as Being, and as substance, and the faith in the ego as substance is projected into all things—in this way, alone, the concept "thing" is created. Being is thought into and insinuated into everything as cause; from the concept "ego," alone, can the concept "Being" proceed. At the beginning stands the tremendously fatal error of supposing the will to be something that actuates,—a faculty. Now we know that it is only a word. They concluded that these categories could not be derived from experience,—on the contrary, the whole of experience rather contradicts them. Whence do they come therefore? In this section, Nietzsche demonstrates the process by which previous philosophers have fictionalized the apparent world, casting the product of the senses into doubt, and thereby removing the concept of the real world. The section is divided into six parts:. Nietzsche is not a hedonist , arguing that any passions in excess can "drag their victim down with the weight of their folly. In an analogy, Nietzsche claims that the Christian approach to morality is not much different than how an unskilled dentist might treat any tooth pain by removing the tooth entirely rather than pursue other less aggressive and equally effective treatments. Christianity doesn't attempt to "spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire," which leads Nietzsche to conclude that the Christian Church is "hostile to life. Nietzsche develops his idea of spiritualizing the passions through examining the concepts of love and enmity. Love, he claims, is actually the "spiritualization of sensuality. Even with the anti-Christian sentiment that pervades his thinking, Nietzsche makes it very clear that he has no interest in eliminating the Christian Church. Instead, he recognizes that his own philosophical program would be neither as effective or necessary without it. If his enemy the Church denies the "instincts of life," this helps him to develop a position that affirms them. Using theological language, Nietzsche insists that the real " blasphemy " is the Christian "rebellion against life. Nietzsche concludes that insisting people ought to be one way and not another leads to a form of bigotry that devalues the goodness of human diversity, the "enchanting wealth of types. Ultimately, Nietzsche concludes that it is "immoralists" such as himself who have the highest respect for inherent worth of individuals because they do not value one person's approach to life over any others. In the chapter The Four Great Errors , he suggests that people, especially Christians, confuse the effect for the cause, and that they project the human ego and subjectivity on to other things, thereby creating the illusionary concept of being , and therefore also of the thing-in-itself and God. In reality, motive or intention is "an accompaniment to an act" [9] rather than the cause of that act. By removing causal agency based on free, conscious will, Nietzsche critiques the ethics of accountability, suggesting that everything is necessary in a whole that can neither be judged nor condemned, because there is nothing outside of it. Men were thought of as free so that they could become guilty : consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness Today, when we have started to move in the reverse direction, when we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with 'punishment' and 'guilt' by means of the concept of the 'moral world-order'. Christianity is a hangman's metaphysics. The Four Great Errors. In this passage, Nietzsche proclaims his lack of belief of an objective morality, stating that there is no such thing as moral fact. With this information, he lists two examples of cases where moralization of mankind was attempted, despite the lack of complete moral truth. The people pushing for this morality are called 'improvers' by Nietzsche, the quotes representing the fact that these certain people fail at their goal of improving man. The first of these examples is that of religion. In this example, Nietzsche tells a fictional story of a priest who converts a man to Christianity , in order to keep him moral. However, his man eventually falls into basic human instinct such as lust, and is thus labeled as a sinner. Afterwards, the man is full of hatred, and is ostracized by others. The priest in this story represents the 'improver,' as he attempts to moralize someone, but only makes the man's life miserable. The second of these examples is that of the caste system in India. This system made an attempt of moralizing man by method of demoting and dehumanizing the Dalit who were at the very bottom of society. The 'improvers' in this scenario are those who perpetuate the caste system, and contribute to the dehumanization of the Dalit for the goal of moralization. In examining German society of his day, Nietzsche attributes any advantage Germans hold over other European countries to basic ethical virtues and not to any cultural sophistication. About certain things one does not ask questions : first imperative of instinct So here's my question for Nietzsche, and I hope he answers me here on Goodreads. Your book, quite provocative and insightful at times, seems to be about how people worship arbitrary idols without even being conscious of it. But why then do you think your readers should have such reverence for the rule of "instinct"? Why should I have any respect at all for concepts like "tradition, authority and centuries-long responsibility"? And why do you, for that matter? By the time we get to track 11, the outro, What I Owe to the Ancients , it's as if a storm has passed, although there's a sense of lingering danger and tempestuous seas. Nietzsche reiterates the connection between Socrates actually, now he's talking about Plato, but those two fellas had similar ideas, didn't they? Idols, in other words. Nietzsche finishes by re-emphasizing the necessity of offering an ecstatic YES to life, "affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems. I agree that it's good to be adaptable, to work through hardship, and that there's something powerful in the idea of being able to say YES to every experience, to accept everything as material for a creative life. And I can understand why people living in troubled times that would be all of us, now find solace and inspiration in this idea, and in Nietzsche's writing in general. I'm with him just up to the point where that affirmation becomes fatalism, an excuse for keeping things the way they are, and where the ecstatic YES becomes contempt for anyone who doesn't or can't follow suit. Probably doesn't deserve a place in the heavy metal pantheon like Schopenhauer's Forever Baptized in Eternal Fire or Kant's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son , or even Nietzsche's self-titled debut, but an album that's worth getting out of the drawer and giving a re-listen, if it's been a while. View all 8 comments. I intend to write an essay about three of the books written in by Nietzsche: the most explosive, the "crazy" ones. What I have found out, re-reading them, is that Nietzsche wasn't crazy at all when he conceived "The Twilight of Idols" for instance as some psychiatrists claim. His truths are more powerful, deeper and more energetic. There is an incredible tension but also a massive - almost unbelieveable - intuition. In his hidden, occult way pre-psychanalytic , Nietzsche is almost always I intend to write an essay about three of the books written in by Nietzsche: the most explosive, the "crazy" ones. In his hidden, occult way pre-psychanalytic , Nietzsche is almost always right. His truth may be "perverse" but it is nevertheless a strong truth. I'd rather be insane with Nietzsche than "normal" with Kant. However, because Nietzsche has written this books weeks before his mental breakdown, they are somehow mythologically charged. Before experiencing his abyss, the German writer had perhaps the most formidable intelectual adventure of all times: if Zarathustra is Everest, Genealogy of the Morals and the writtings from the fateful are a trip to Moon and Mars. The aforementioned virtual essay of mine will probably emulate Papini's tone from the "Twilight of Philosophers". May 11, Geoff marked it as to-read. Jan 07, Griffin Wilson rated it it was amazing Shelves: ph-modern , z-nietzsche. Most excellent. I could recommend this as a good place to start with Nietzsche. He wrote it at the end of his life and seems to bring a lot of ideas from different works together here: critiques of Plato and his impact on the Western tradition, of Christianity, and of "modernity" and various thinkers it produced along with bits and pieces of his solution. I doubt this chaos was natural, since he spent a lot of time thinking about the format he was about to put it with the Antichrist in one book , but there's no doubt he's the gift of writing. I can't approve all his thoughts, but among this ideas flooding, you can't remain neutral. You'll going to be there trying to rebuild what the flood has already demolished, trying to pick some new materials, strong enough to resist the Hammer of the philosopher.. More precisely: we are never understood — hence our authority. You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third case would be as a fugitive. First question of conscience. Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience. Are you one who looks on? Or one who lends a hand? Or one who looks away and walks off? Third question of conscience. Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know wh You run ahead? One must know what one wants and that one wants. Fourth question of conscience. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Nov 12, lavinia rated it did not like it Shelves: philosophy. I am most likely going to burn in reader's hell for this rating. I never really liked Nietzsche, his style always seems to influence the weak with rebellion, especially teenagers. His anger with Christianity is so big that I believe this guy is responsible for a third of today's atheists. Especially if you're in high school, this book is going to influence you a lot. He focuses on how people trust and value much more their non-sensorial traits and how the real sensors are neglected and considered I am most likely going to burn in reader's hell for this rating. He focuses on how people trust and value much more their non-sensorial traits and how the real sensors are neglected and considered perhaps too shallow he gives the nose as an example. He talks a lot about Christians and they're beliefs in heaven, about how this proofs they're dislike of the real world. He picks on Plato a lot, and later on some german philosophers. Overall, this was a drag to read, with no valuable take-aways for me. Luckily it's a short book, otherwise I would have given up for sure after the first hundred pages. View 1 comment. Sep 29, Ali Gilani rated it it was amazing. Nietzsche writes in a vague prose, and there are multiple interpretations of his texts, but I will make it simpler for me and write my first impressions of the book. I believe it is a great piece of prose. And his aphoristic style is short and curt and as the name of the book suggests, it really feels like someone is pounding you with a hammer. The blows are swift and direct. As I read an English translation much of the lyrical effect, the play on the words is left out, somewhere pointed out by Nietzsche writes in a vague prose, and there are multiple interpretations of his texts, but I will make it simpler for me and write my first impressions of the book. As I read an English translation much of the lyrical effect, the play on the words is left out, somewhere pointed out by footnotes. The book starts with his Maxims, with some of his famous ones there too. There are a lot of pithy aphorisms you will find inside the book chapters as well. But the ones in Maxims and Arrows are standalone. Then comes his chapter on Socrates. And I tend to agree with Nietzsche most of what he writes about Socrates. Imagine a guy who goes to the market, the city center to talk to random people and insult them, make them feel stupid. Socrates was a genius, and he used his genius to insult people. How noble is that? That is the modern day equivalent of trolls on the internet. Some refined reasoning put in to such a use. Nietzsche questions what prompted Socrates to act the way he acted? His own insecurities? His ugliness? A foreigner who could read faces passing through Athens told Socrates that he contained within him every kind of lust and vice. When he analyzes and insults, he is actually questioning the motives of those famous philosophers. A buffoon who got himself to be taken seriously. When you make a lot of enemies, you earn a lot of friends too. And he wanted to die. It was the man himself who forced Athens to give him a death sentence. They try to dehistoricize, and try to view from the viewpoint of eternity. We can witness this today as well, people analyzing events without the context of that era. Pedophilia was considered normal once, to quote an example. Then he goes on to critique apparent and real world distinction: the read world according to Plato is the perfect world of ideas, and according to Christianity the life after death. So he gives his four propositions, the first one of them is this apparent world is real, its apparent qualities actually justifies and establishes its reality. Another kind of reality is not demonstrable. Life after death is not demonstrable. They are fantasies. Nietzsche comes out as a stark realist and cuts out all the nonsense. A kind of castration in which you decapacitate the man of his passions. The man is weakened. Instead of spiritualizing, beautifying and deifying a passion, the passion is exterminated. Hostile to life. A castration. In The Four Great Errors, the chapter that follows, Neitzsche turns into a logician and gives lessons about errors of confusing cause and consequence, false causality, imaginary causes, and their psychological explanations. He then chucks the entire realm of morality and religion under the concepts of imaginary causes. He analyzes free will, and how it has given approval for the priests to hold people accountable and give them punishment or render them with guilt. In the end, he denies Accountability. He finds the pagan practice of caste system more solid, more Aryan, more likely to produce great men than Christian morality. At the end he mentions how the creators of moral orders, did not feel pangs of conscience to tell lies. They never doubted their right to tell lies. Whether Manu, Plato, Confucius or any other religious or moral authority, they told lies. He concludes that every code to make men moral had an immoral start. He also recommends learning to see, to think and to write. To see is to hold back quick judgment, a knee-jerk reaction. He talks about literary figures, criticizes a lot many and appraises a few. Some are obscure and maybe popular back then like Sainte Bueve, George Sand etc. Some paragraphs are brilliant pieces of writing and they have either loose connections or none at all. It too has a function: To glorify, to select, to praise, to highlight and to strengthen or weaken certain valuations. In many ways, Nietzsche expounds his existential views. Of power, of freedom, of limitations. His conception of freedom is power. More power makes you more free. It removes the impediments, the hurdles out of your way. They hold too much energy in them. He praises Sallust, from whom he owes his aphoristic style. And Thucydides. He finds Plato boring, and for good reason. Celebrates the Ancient practices of affirming life by deifying sex and birth rather than holding them sinful by later Christian morality. Aug 27, Taylor Lee rated it liked it Shelves: german , philosophy. The aphoristic format is sometimes fatiguing, but this reads like a compendium of Nietzschean wit and insight. The fragmented nature of the work can be disorienting. Mar 17, Dario added it Shelves: philosophy. Nietzsche wrote 6 books in , most of them in the latter half of the year. In January he suffered a mental breakdown allegedly defending a horse that was being flogged in Turin. Excluding a few letters, he never wrote again. He spent the remaining 11 years of his life in the care of various relatives and psychiatrists before dying in at the age of Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer was to be one of his last works. At the time of Twilight Nietzsche was Nietzsche wrote 6 books in , most of them in the latter half of the year. At the time of Twilight Nietzsche was just starting to amass a humble readership for the first time. He saw this book functioning somewhat as an introduction to his philosophy. Its manner is fast-paced and its structure eclectic. Formally speaking, the book jumps all over the place, including aphorisms, poems, monographs, as well as a huge range of chapter sizes, ranging from 1 page to odd pages. Nietzsche is having a lot of fun. He gleefully tears across all number of philosophers, historians, philologists, writers, etc. In this most famous of Western philosophers Nietzsche sees the epitome of decadence, degeneration. Socrates inspired the ancient Greeks so fervently precisely because he represented to the highest degree the decay of their instincts, their nobler instincts, but also, the way out. The ancient Greece of 'reason' was a disaster. Or at least, born of disaster. This disaster was the degeneration of their instincts, the becoming-self- destructive of their instincts. The contradiction and confusion of the instincts is the sign or symptom of decadence par excellence. And Nietzsche is insistent on his symptomatology as methodology. The late Nietzsche deploys physiology and psychology as philosophical tools to devastating effect. For Nietzsche, we have to go much further back before we get to the truly magnificent Greece. This , is the Greece of Dionysus. Dionysianism is the intoxicating art of the affirmation of multiplicity, the affirmation of life itself. The Dionysian is a festival, it is orgiastic; it is that true freedom of spirit that is strong enough to say a resounding yes to life and all that it produces, the bellowing yes to becoming, to the "innocence of becoming"; the creator and destroyer of values who cannot help but bear the swollen will of millennia and tear humanity forward into destiny. To where, exactly? Man is a bridge! Creators are those who have become child, and to become child you must be reborn, and to be reborn means to face the tragic, to face those enemies who may even seem insurmountable. This indeed is what Nietzsche finds in his own self-reflection upon the birth of tragedy: not a catharsis, but a boundless affirmation! Twilight of the Idols - Wikipedia

The other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in confusing the last and the first. They place that which comes at the end--unfortunately! This again is nothing but their way of showing reverence: the higher may not grow out of the lower, may not have grown at all. Moral: whatever is of the first rank must be causa sui. Origin out of something else is considered an objection, a questioning of value. All the highest values are of the first rank; all the highest concepts, that which has being, the unconditional, the good, the true, the perfect--all these cannot have become and must therefore be causes. All these, moreover, cannot be unlike each other or in contradiction to each other. Thus they arrive at their stupendous concept, "God. Why did mankind have to take seriously the brain afflictions of sick web-spinners? They have paid dearly for it! At long last, let us contrast the very different manner in which we conceive the problem of error and appearance. I say "we" for politeness' sake. Formerly, alteration, change, any becoming at all, were taken as proof of mere appearance, as an indication that there must be something which led us astray. Today, conversely, precisely insofar as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves somehow caught in error, compelled into error. So certain are we, on the basis of rigorous examination, that this is where the error lies. It is no different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there our eye is the constant advocate of error, here it is our language. In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things--only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word. Very much later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened, philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything empirical--for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Whence, then, were they derived? And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: "We must once have been at home in a higher world instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth ; we must have been divine, for we have reason! After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. It will be appreciated if I condense so essential and so new an insight into four theses. In that way I facilitate comprehension; in that way I provoke contradiction. First proposition. The reasons for which "this" world has been characterized as "apparent" are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable. Second proposition. The criteria which have been bestowed on the "true being" of things are the criteria of not-being, of naught, the "true world" has been constructed out of contradiction to the actual world: indeed an apparent world, insofar as it is merely a moral-optical illusion. Third proposition. To invent fables about a world "other" than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of "another," a "better" life. Fourth proposition. Any distinction between a "true" and an "apparent" world--whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant in the end, an underhanded Christian --is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality is no objection to this proposition. For "appearance" in this case means reality once more, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible--he is Dionysian. The true world--attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth. The true world-- unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man "for the sinner who repents". Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible--it becomes female, it becomes Christian. The true world--unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it--a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The true world--unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? The "true" world--an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating--an idea which has become useless and superfluous--consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits. The true world--we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity--and a later, very much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they "spiritualize" themselves. Formerly, in view of the element of stupidity in passion, war was declared on passion itself, its destruction was plotted; all the old moral monsters are agreed on this: il faut tuer les passions. The most famous formula for this is to be found in the New Testament, in that Sermon on the Mount, where, incidentally, things are by no means looked at from a height. There it is said, for example, with particular reference to sexuality: "If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out. Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity--today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of stupidity. We no longer admire dentists who "pluck out" teeth so that they will not hurt any more. To be fair, it should be admitted, however, that on the ground out of which Christianity grew, the concept of the "spiritualization of passion" could never have been formed. After all, the first church, as is well known, fought against the "intelligent" in favor of the "poor in spirit. The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its "cure," is castratism. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving? But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life. The same means in the fight against a craving--castration, extirpation--is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation on themselves; by those who are so constituted that they require La Trappe, to use a figure of speech, or without any figure of speech some kind of definitive declaration of hostility, a cleft between themselves and the passion. Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of the will--or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to a stimulus--is itself merely another form of degeneration. The radical hostility, the deadly hostility against sensuality, is always a symptom to reflect on: it entitles us to suppositions concerning the total state of one who is excessive in this manner. This hostility, this hatred, by the way, reaches its climax only when such types lack even the firmness for this radical cure, for this renunciation of their "devil. The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it represents a great triumph over Christianity. Another triumph is our spiritualization of hostility. It consists in a profound appreciation of the value of having enemies: in short, it means acting and thinking in the opposite way from that which has been the rule. The church always wanted the destruction of its enemies; we, we immoralists and Antichristians, find our advantage in this, that the church exists. In the political realm too, hostility has now become more spiritual--much more sensible, much more thoughtful, much more considerate. Almost every party understands how it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposition should not lose all strength; the same is true of power politics. A new creation in particular--the new Reich, for example--needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel itself necessary, in opposition alone does it become necessary. Our attitude to the "internal enemy" is no different: here too we have spiritualized hostility; here too we have come to appreciate its value. The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace. Nothing has become more alien to us than that desideratum of former times, "peace of soul," the Christian desideratum; there is nothing we envy less than the moralistic cow and the fat happiness of the good conscience. One has renounced the great life when one renounces war. In many cases, to be sure, "peace of soul" is merely a misunderstanding--something else, which lacks only a more honest name. Without further ado or prejudice, a few examples. Or the beginning of weariness, the first shadow of evening, of any kind of evening. Or a sign that the air is humid, that south winds are approaching. Or unrecognized gratitude for a good digestion sometimes called "love of man". Or the attainment of calm by a convalescent who feels a new relish in all things and waits. Or the state which follows a thorough satisfaction of our dominant passion, the well-being of a rare repletion. Or the senile weakness of our will, our cravings, our vices. Or laziness, persuaded by vanity to give itself moral airs. Or the emergence of certainty, even a dreadful certainty, after long tension and torture by uncertainty. Or the expression of maturity and mastery in the midst of doing, creating, working, and willing--calm breathing, attained "freedom of the will. I reduce a principle to a formula. Every naturalism in morality--that is, every healthy morality--is dominated by an instinct of life, some commandment of life is fulfilled by a determinate canon of "shalt" and "shalt not"; some inhibition and hostile element on the path of life is thus removed. Anti-natural morality--that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached--turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, "God looks at the heart," it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life, and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch. Life has come to an end where the "kingdom of God" begins. Once one has comprehended the outrage of such a revolt against life as has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality, one has, fortunately, also comprehended something else: the futility, apparentness, absurdity, and mendaciousness of such a revolt. A condemnation of life by the living remains in the end a mere symptom of a certain kind of life: the question whether it is justified or unjustified is not even raised thereby. One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem. When we speak of values, we speak with the inspiration, with the way of looking at things, which is part of life: life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values. From this it follows that even that anti-natural morality which conceives of God as the counter-concept and condemnation of life is only a value judgment of life--but of what life? I have already given the answer: of declining, weakened, weary, condemned life. Morality, as it has so far been understood--as it has in the end been formulated once more by Schopenhauer, as "negation of the will to life"--is the very instinct of decadence, which makes an imperative of itself. It says: "Perish! Let us finally consider how naive it is altogether to say: "Man ought to be such and such! Man ought to be different. The single human being is a piece of fatum from the front and from the rear, one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to be. To say to him, "Change yourself! And indeed there have been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, that is, virtuous--they wanted him remade in their own image, as a prig: to that end, they negated the world! No small madness! No modest kind of immodesty! Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity--an idiosyncrasy of degenerates which has caused immeasurable harm. We others, we immoralists, have, conversely, made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending, and approving. We do not easily negate; we make it a point of honor to be affirmers. More and more, our eyes have opened to that economy which needs and knows how to utilize everything that the holy witlessness of the priest, the diseased reason in the priest, rejects--that economy in the law of life which finds an advantage even in the disgusting species of the prigs, the priests, the virtuous. What advantage? But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer. The error of confusing cause and effect. There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason. Yet this error belongs among the most ancient and recent habits of mankind: it is even hallowed among us and goes by the name of "religion" or "morality. I give an example. Everybody knows the book of the famous Cornaro in which he recommends his slender diet as a recipe for a long and happy life--a virtuous one too. Few books have been read so much; even now thousands of copies are sold in England every year. I do not doubt that scarcely any book except the Bible, as is meet has done as much harm, has shortened as many lives, as this well-intentioned curiosum. The reason: the mistaking of the effect for the cause. The worthy Italian thought his diet was the cause of his long life, whereas the precondition for a long life, the extraordinary slowness of his metabolism, the consumption of so little, was the cause of his slender diet. He was not free to eat little or much; his frugality was not a matter of "free will": he became sick when he ate more. But whoever is no carp not only does well to eat properly, but needs to. A scholar in our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would simply destroy himself with Cornaro's diet. Crede experto. The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: "Do this and that, refrain from this and that--then you will be happy! In my mouth, this formula is changed into its opposite--first example of my "revaluation of all values": a well-turned-out human being, a "happy one," must perform certain actions and shrinks instinctively from other actions; he carries the order, which he represents physiologically, into his relations with other human beings and things. In a formula: his virtue is the effect of his happiness. A long life, many descendants--these are not the wages of virtue: rather virtue itself is that slowing down of the metabolism which leads, among other things, also to a long life, many descendants--in short, to Cornarism. The church and morality say: "A generation, a people, are destroyed by license and luxury. This young man turns pale early and wilts; his friends say: that is due to this or that disease. I say: that he became diseased, that he did not resist the disease, was already the effect of an impoverished life or hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party destroys itself by making such a mistake. My higher politics says: a party which makes such mistakes has reached its end; it has lost its sureness of instinct. Every mistake in every sense is the effect of the degeneration of instinct, of the disintegration of the will: one could almost define what is bad in this way. All that is good is instinct--and hence easy, necessary, free. Laboriousness is an objection: the god is typically different from the hero. In my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity. The error of a false causality. People have believed at all times that they knew what a cause is; but whence did we take our knowledge--or more precisely, our faith--that we had such knowledge? From the realm of the famous "inner facts," of which not a single one has so far proved to be factual. We believed ourselves to be causal in the act of willing: we thought that here at least we caught causality in the act. Nor did one doubt that all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness and would be found there once sought--as "motives": else one would not have been free and responsible for it. Finally, who would have denied that a thought is caused? Of these three "inward facts" which seem to guarantee causality, the first and most persuasive is that of the will as cause. The conception of a consciousness "spirit" as a cause, and later also that of the ego as cause the "subject" , are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as given, as empirical. Meanwhile we have thought better of it. Today we no longer believe a word of all this. The "inner world" is full of phantoms and will-o'-the-wisps: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either--it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them. And as for the ego! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will! What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for that has gone to the devil. That is what follows! And what a fine abuse we had perpetrated with this "empirical evidence"; we created the world on this basis as a world of causes, a world of will, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here and did not do anything else: all that happened was considered a doing, all doing the effect of a will; the world became to it a multiplicity of doers; a doer a "subject" was slipped under all that happened. It was out of himself that man projected his three "inner facts"--that in which he believed most firmly: the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego; he posited "things" as "being," in his image, in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Small wonder that later he always found in things only that which he gad put into them. The thing itself, to say it once more, the concept of thing is a mere reflex of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear mechanists and physicists--how much error, how much rudimentary psychology is still residual in your atom! Not to mention the "thing-in-itself," the horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians! The error of the spirit as cause mistaken for reality! And made the very measure of reality! And called God! The error of imaginary causes. To begin with dreams: ex post facto, a cause is slipped under a particular sensation for example, one following a far-off cannon shot --often a whole little novel in which the dreamer turns up as the protagonist. The sensation endures meanwhile in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the causal instinct permits it to step into the foreground--now no longer as a chance occurrence, but as "meaning. What is really later, the motivation, is experienced first--often with a hundred details which pass like lightning and the shot follows. What has happened? The representations which were produced by a certain state have been misunderstood as its causes. In fact, we do the same thing when awake. Most of our general feelings--every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and explosion in the play and counterplay of our organs, and particularly the state of the nervus sympaticus--excite our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that--for feeling bad or for feeling good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only--become conscious of it only--when we have furnished some kind of motivation. Memory, which swings into action in such cases, unknown to us, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them--not their real causes. The faith, to be sure, that such representations, such accompanying conscious processes are the causes is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause--even precludes it. The psychological explanation of this. To derive something unknown from something familiar relieves, comforts, and satisfies, besides giving a feeling of power. With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive representations, one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them: the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one "considers it true. The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why? That it is something already familiar, experienced, and inscribed in the memory, which is posited as a cause, that is the first consequence of this need. That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one searches not only for some kind of explanation to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation--that which has most quickly and most frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new, and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. Consequence: one kind of positing of causes predominates more and more, is concentrated into a system and finally emerges as dominant, that is, as simply precluding other causes and explanations. The banker immediately thinks of "business," the Christian of "sin," and the girl of her love. The whole realm of morality and religion belongs under this concept of imaginary causes. The "explanation" of disagreeable general feelings. They are produced by beings that are hostile to us evil spirits: the most famous case--the misunderstanding of the hysterical as witches. They are produced by acts which cannot be approved the feeling of "sin," of "sinfulness," is slipped under a physiological discomfort; one always finds reasons for being dissatisfied with oneself. They are produced as punishments, as payment for something we should not have done, for what we should not have been impudently generalized by Schopenhauer into a principle in which morality appears as what it really is--as the very poisoner and slanderer of life: "Every great pain, whether physical or spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it. They are produced as effects of ill- considered actions that turn out badly. Here the affects, the senses, are posited as causes, as "guilty"; and physiological calamities are interpreted with the help of other calamities as "deserved. The "explanation" of agreeable general feelings. They are produced by trust in God. They are produced by the consciousness of good deeds the so-called "good conscience"--a physiological state which at times looks so much like good digestion that it is hard to tell them apart. They are produced by the successful termination of some enterprise a naive fallacy: the successful termination of some enterprise does not by any means give a hypochondriac or a Pascal agreeable general feelings. They are produced by faith, charity, and hope--the Christian virtues. In truth, all these supposed explanations are resultant states and, as it were, translations of pleasurable or unpleasurable feelings into a false dialect: one is in a state of hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest. Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes. The error of free will. Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of "free will": we know only too well what it really is--the foulest of all theologians' artifices aimed at making mankind "responsible" in their sense, that is, dependent upon them. Here I simply supply the psychology of all "making responsible. Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being-such-and-such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt. The entire old psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish--or wanted to create this right for God. Men were considered "free" so that they might be judged and punished--so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness and thus the most fundamental counterfeit in psychologicis was made the principle of psychology itself. Today, as we have entered into the reverse movement and we immoralists are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment out of the world again, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a "moral world-order" to infect the innocence of becoming by means of "punishment" and "guilt. What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives man his qualities--neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant--perhaps by Plato already. No one is responsible for man's being there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Man is not the effect of some special purpose, of a will, an end; nor is he the object of an attempt to attain an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end. One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a causa prima, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit"--that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world. My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena--more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real, and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking; thus "truth," at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call "imaginings. Semeiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inwardnesses which did not know enough to "understand" themselves. Morality is mere sign language, mere symptomatology: one must know what it is all about to be able to profit from it. A first example, quite provisional. At all times they have wanted to "improve" men: this above all was called morality. Under the same word, however, the most divergent tendencies are concealed. Both the taming of the beast, man, and the breeding of a particular kind of man have been called "improvement. To call the taming of an animal its "improvement" sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in menageries doubts that the beasts are "improved" there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has "improved. Like a caricature of man, like a miscarriage: he had become a "sinner," he was stuck in a cage, imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, malevolent against himself, full of hatred against the springs of life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a "Christian. Physiologically speaking: in the struggle with beasts, to make them sick may be the only means for making them weak. This the church understood: it ruined man, it weakened him--but it claimed to have "improved" him. Let us consider the other case of so- called morality, the case of breeding, a particular race and kind. The most magnificent example of this is furnished by Indian morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of "the law of Manu. Obviously, we are here no longer among animal tamers: a kind of man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is the condition for even conceiving such a plan of breeding. One heaves a sigh of relief at leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this healthier, higher, and wider world. How wretched is the New Testament compared to Manu, how foul it smells! Yet this organization too found it necessary to be terrible--this time not in the struggle with beasts, but with their counter-concept, the unbred man, the mishmash man, the chandala. And again it had no other means for keeping him from being dangerous, for making him weak, than to make him sick--it was the fight with the "great number. The third edict, for example Avadana-Sastra I , "on impure vegetables," ordains that the only nourishment permitted to the chandala shall be garlic and onions, seeing that the holy scripture prohibits giving them grain or fruit with grains, or water or fire. The same edict orders that the water they need may not be taken from rivers or wells, nor from ponds, but only from the approaches to swamps and from holes made by the footsteps of animals. They are also prohibited from washing their laundry and from washing themselves, since the water they are conceded as an act of grace may be used only to quench thirst. Finally, a prohibition that Sudra women may not assist chandala women in childbirth, and a prohibition that the latter may not assist each other in this condition. The success of such sanitary police measures was inevitable: murderous epidemics, ghastly venereal diseases, and thereupon again "the law of the knife," ordaining circumcision for male children and the removal of the internal labia for female children. Manu himself says: "The chandalas are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime these, the necessary consequences of the concept of breeding. For clothing they shall have only rags from corpses; for dishes, broken pots; for adornment, old iron; for divine services, only evil spirits. They shall wander without rest from place to place. They are prohibited from writing from left to right, and from using the right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and of from-left-to-right is reserved for the virtuous, for the people of race. These regulations are instructive enough: here we encounter for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial--we learn that the concept of "pure blood" is the opposite of a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes clear in which people the hatred, the chandala hatred, against this "humaneness" has eternalized itself, where it has become religion, where it has become genius. Seen in this perspective, the Gospels represent a document of prime importance; even more, the Book of Enoch. Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity--the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against "race": the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love. The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as the supreme principle that, to make morality, one must have the unconditional will to its opposite. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact--that of the so-called pia fraus [holy lie]--offered me the first approach to this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral. Among Germans today it is not enough to have spirit: one must arrogate it, one must have the arrogance to have spirit. Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths. The new Germany represents a large quantum of fitness, both inherited and acquired by training, so that for a time it may expend its accumulated store of strength, even squander it. It is not a high culture that has thus become the master, and even less a delicate taste, a noble "beauty" of the instincts; but more virile virtues than any other country in Europe can show. Much cheerfulness and self-respect, much assurance in social relations and in the reciprocality of duties, much industriousness, much perseverance--and an inherited moderation which needs the spur rather than the brake. I add that here one still obeys without feeling that obedience humiliates. And nobody despises his opponent. One will notice that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want to break faith with myself here. I must therefore also state my objections to them. One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid. The Germans--once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters. Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles--I fear that was the end of German philosophy. Are there German poets? Are there good German books? I blush; but with the courage which I maintain even in desperate situations I reply: "Well, Bismarck. Accursed instinct of mediocrity! What the German spirit might be--who has not had his melancholy ideas about that! But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely. Recently even a third has been added--one that alone would be suffficient to dispatch all fine and bold fiexibility of the spirit--music, our constipated, constipating German music. How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown--how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit's instinct of self-preservation-- and drink beer? The alcoholism of young scholars is perhaps no question mark concerning their scholarliness--without spirit one can still be a great scholar--but in every other respect it remains a problem. Where would one not find the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit? Once, in a case that has almost become famous, I put my finger on such a degeneration--the degeneration of our number-one German free spirit, the clever David Strauss, into the author of a beer-bench gospel and "new faith. I was speaking of the German spirit: it is becoming cruder, it is becoming shallower. Is that enough? At bottom, it is something quite different that alarms me: how German seriousness, German depth, German passion in spiritual matters are declining more and more. The verve has changed, not just the intellectuality. Here and there I come into contact with German universities: what an atmosphere prevails among their scholars, what desolate spirituality--and how contented and lukewarm it has become! It would be a profound misunderstanding if one wanted to adduce German science against me-it would also be proof that one has not read a word I have written. For seventeen years I have never tired of calling attention to the despiritualizing influence of our current science-industry. The hard helotism to which the tremendous range of the sciences condemns every scholar today is a main reason why those with a fuller, richer, profounder disposition no longer find a congenial education and congenial educators. There is nothing of which our culture suffers more than of the superabundance of pretentious jobbers and fragments of humanity; our universities are, against their will, the real hothouses for this kind of withering of the instincts of the spirit. And the whole of Europe already has some idea of this--power politics deceives nobody. Germany is considered more and more as Europe's flatland. I am still looking for a German with whom I might be able to be serious in my own way--and how much more for one with whom I might be cheerful! Twilight of the Idols: who today would comprehend from what seriousness a philosopher seeks recreation here? Our cheerfulness is what is most incomprehensible about us. Even a rapid estimate shows that it is not only obvious that German culture is declining but that there is sufficient reason for that. In the end, no one can spend more than he has: that is true of an individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interests--if one spends in the direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self- overcoming which one represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction. Culture and the state--one should not deceive one-self about this--are antagonists: "Kultur-Staat" is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political. Goethe's heart opened at the phenomenon of Napoleon--it closed at the "Wars of Liberation. Even today much new seriousness, much new passion of the spirit, have migrated to Paris; the question of pessimism, for example, the question of Wagner, and almost all psychological and artistic questions are there weighed incomparably more delicately and thoroughly than in Germany--the Germans are altogether incapable of this kind of seriousness. In the history of European culture the rise of the "Reich" means one thing above all: a displacement of the center of gravity. It is already known everywhere: in what matters most--and that always remains culture--the Germans are no longer worthy of consideration. One asks: Can you point to even a single spirit who counts from a European point of view, as your Goethe, your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer counted? That there is no longer a single German philosopher--about that there is no end of astonishment. The entire system of higher education in Germany has lost what matters most: the end as well as the means to the end. That education, that Bildung, is itself an end--and not "the Reich"--and that educators are needed to that end, and not secondary-school teachers and university scholars--that has been forgotten. Educators are needed who have themselves been educated, superior, noble spirits, proved at every moment, proved by words and silence, representing culture which has grown ripe and sweet--not the learned louts whom secondary schools and universities today offer our youth as "higher wet nurses. One of this rarest of exceptions is my venerable friend, Jacob Burckhardt in Basel: it is primarily to him that Basel owes its pre-eminence in humaneness. What the "higher schools" in Germany really achieve is a brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service. All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. What contributes to the decline of German culture? That "higher education" is no longer a privilege--the democratism of Bildung, which has become "common"--too common. Let it not be forgotten that military privileges really compel an all-too-great attendance in the higher schools, and thus their downfall. In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our "higher schools" are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet "finished," or if he did not yet know the answer to the "main question": which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like "callings," precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of "finishing": at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child. Our overcrowded secondary schools, our overworked, stupefied secondary-school teachers, are a scandal: for one to defend such conditions, as the professors at Heidelberg did recently, there may perhaps be causes--reasons there are none. I put forward at once--lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily- -the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see--accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to "will"--to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion--almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word "vice" is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things--in short, the famous modern "objectivity"--is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out. One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery--that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing. Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle? The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping--that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such. The German has no fingers for nuances. That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace. For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education--to be able to dance with one's feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to dance with the pen too--that one must learn to write? But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German readers. My impossible ones. Rousseau: or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus [in natural filth]. Dante: or the hyena who writes poetry in tombs. Kant: or cant as an intelligible character. Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense. Liszt: or the school of smoothness-- with women. George Sand: or lactea ubertas --in translation, the milk cow with "a beautiful style. Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner. John Stuart Mill: or insulting clarity. Zola: or "the delight in stinking. Witness Renan who, whenever he risks a Yes or No of a more general nature scores a miss with painful regularity. He wants for example, to weld together la science and la noblesse: but la science belongs with democracy; what could be plainer? With no little ambition, he wishes to represent an aristocracy of the spirit: yet at the same time he is on his knees before its very counter-doctrine, the evangile des humbles--and not only on his knees. To what avail is all free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery, and wry-neck suppleness, if in one's guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic--in fact, a priest! Renan is most inventive, just like a Jesuit and father confessor, when it comes to seduction; his spirituality does not even lack the broad fat popish smile--like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. Nobody can equal him when it comes to adoring in a manner endangering life itself. This spirit of Renan's, a spirit which is enervated, is one more calamity for poor, sick, will-sick France. Sainte Beuve. Wanders around, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping--a female at bottom, with a female's lust for revenge and a female's sensuality. Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to the ressentiment of Rousseau: consequently, a romantic--for underneath all romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau's instinct for revenge. A revolutionary, but still pretty well harnessed by fear. Without freedom when confronted with anything strong public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal. Embittered against everything great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself. Poet and half-female enough to sense the great as a power; always writhing like the famous worm because he always feels stepped upon. As a critic, without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan libertine's tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage even to confess his libertinage. As a historian, without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye--hence declining the task of judging in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of "objectivity. In some respects, a preliminary version of Baudelaire. De imitatione Christi is one of those books which I cannot hold in my hand without a physiological reaction: it exudes a perfume of the Eternal-Feminine which is strictly for Frenchmen--or Wagnerians. This saint has a way of talking about love which arouses even Parisian women to curiosity. I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, Auguste Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science, found his inspiration in this book. I believe it: "the religion of the heart. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth--it stands and falls with faith in God. When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem. George Sand. I cannot stand this motley wallpaper style any more than the mob aspiration for generous feelings. The worst feature, to be sure, is the female's coquetry with male attributes, with the manners of naughty boys. How cold she must have been throughout, this insufferable artist! She wound herself up like a clock--and wrote. Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all the romantics as soon as they took up poetic invention. And how self-satisfied she may have lain there all the while, this fertile writing-cow who had in her something German in the bad sense, like Rousseau himself, her master, and who in any case was possible only during the decline of French taste! But Renan reveres her. Moral for psychologists. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes "an evil eye. He never works "from nature"; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the "case," "nature," that which is "experienced. What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature" seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is-- that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is. Toward a psychology of the artist. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction, the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them--this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process. In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche ,. Richard Polt Translator ,. Tracy B. Strong Introduction. An authoritative Introduction by Strong makes this an outstanding edition. Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. More Details Original Title. Richard Wagner. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Twilight of the Idols , please sign up. See 1 question about Twilight of the Idols…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Twilight of the Idols. Jul 20, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: classics , literature , philosophy , german , 19th-century , non-fiction. Twilight of the Idols was written in just over a week, between 26 August and 3 September , while Nietzsche was on holiday in Sils Maria. As Nietzsche's fame and popularity were spreading both inside and outside Germany, he felt that he needed a text that would serve as a short introduction to his work. Well, I really wanted to philosophize with a hammer, but I said to myself, 'Who the heck will show me how? Alarming for a motorized scooter, anyway. I turned around in my fluorescent yellow booth at Subway, where I was busy 'enjoying' a Veggie Delite [sic], only to see a deranged- looking man with enough mustache for the entire cast of a s Well, I really wanted to philosophize with a hammer, but I said to myself, 'Who the heck will show me how? I turned around in my fluorescent yellow booth at Subway, where I was busy 'enjoying' a Veggie Delite [sic], only to see a deranged-looking man with enough mustache for the entire cast of a s gay porn film piloting his scooter directly for me! He collided with my shin and shouted like a man reciting from an eye chart across a large gymnasium, 'Did! It was very undignified. I pretended I hadn't noticed by dabbing at my mouth with my napkin and looking out the window distractedly. Eventually he got the the scooter under control, but now he was faced in the wrong direction. This didn't stop him though. With a hammer! He sighed dramatically and slumped further in his seat before turning the scooter on again. In lurches and spasms, he finally managed to turn the thing around so he was facing me. It was then that I noticed he had mustard in his mustache. The man had apparently bitch-slapped me. But I was far too shocked to be offended. I started stammering idiotically. It felt like Catholic school all over again. Every one of you! I tried to act casual and finish my Veggie Delite [sic], but every bite tasted of his bitter contempt. I wasn't sure if he had just refused to teach me to philosophize with a hammer or whether that had been the lesson. For more of my informative reflections on Nietzsche, why don't you visit my darling little blog? It's sexy and delicious. View all 29 comments. Jul 18, Rscarff rated it really liked it. Can you imagine how much fun Nietzsche must have been at parties? Guest No. Freddy: The devil is a creation of the ultimate mishap upon humankind, and this egg is a desecration of the fruit of the first instinct. Fred: I hate it. And so on. Obviously, Nietzsche had a titanic mind, and while his immoralisim is in direct conflict with my personal worldview, many of his ideas remain profound a century and a half later. That he d Can you imagine how much fun Nietzsche must have been at parties? That he declares this his immodest intention should come as no surprise by the time you read this declaration in the last part of the book. Dec 08, joycesu rated it really liked it. This book frustrated me beyond comprehension. I hated him so vehemently for many different reasons: He whines incessantly about things like the downfall of German intellectualism, yet offers no solution. He "critiques" a great many other philosopher , writer, or artist, but offers little to no actual insight to the "idol;" he simply alludes to their "stupidity," much like a child with a chip on his shoulder. His style of writing is disjointed and hard to follow this could be my translation too tho This book frustrated me beyond comprehension. His style of writing is disjointed and hard to follow this could be my translation too though. I found his thought and writing patterns to be erratic, contradictory at times , and often incomplete. He comes off as pompous and completely arrogant as well. Along with this I just felt totally berated as a reader with his abrasive tone: even when I wanted to agree with him, I still felt like I was being punished. My desire to dig out his hypocrisy, only inspired me to further research the subjects in question. For this, I am happy as I find immense pleasure in learning. I also have a whole new set of books to read. I found a lot of his insights that I DID agree with to be interesting, and since his personality is so deeply embedded in his writing, I was also incredibly entertained by his profoundly rooted nihilism. I food myself chuckling and thinking, "is this guy for REAL? Sure, it was seething hatred and apocalyptic accusations, but I FELT something inside my mind explode. Often times while I'm reading I'll find myself in blissful complacency, agreeing and absorbing. Nietzsche really got me so angry to the point where I questioned a lot of my own philosophies and most epically, WHY I disagreed with his. Ultimately the book served its purpose, so for that, I have to say I rather enjoyed it. I, however, still dislike Nietzsche View all 7 comments. Upon reading the reviews here, it surprises me how many people misunderstand what Nietzsche is saying; he is definitely not a nihilist. Rather, he affirms life. An example would be where he talks of freedom. You gain freedom by affirming life, in spite of the pain and suffering that comes with life strikes me as Buddhist. I might add that the point in philosophy isn't whether or not you agree with what is being stated. It's how it affects you. View all 3 comments. Nietzsche has a strange effect on me, in that his ideas resonate in my mind when I go through a bad day, otherwise - will see The aura of negative theology has always accompanied Nietzsche's thinking. Perceived as a destroyer of idols, as an opponent to the cultural tradition, as an iconoclast to any spiritual authority other than that of one's own spirit, as " the greatest assassin of God ", - he raises statues, in his work, to other new idols. The values by which the philosophers were guid Nietzsche has a strange effect on me, in that his ideas resonate in my mind when I go through a bad day, otherwise - will see That of appearance, where the body is more valuable than the intellect? Quite frightening We also find that " civilization has fallen because it has been subjugated by the Christian religion, and, in this time, no other god has been created. Almost two thousand years, and no other new god ". Nietzsche leave the impression that he wants to become an idol, an prophet, to announce a new era of culture : " I gave to humanity the deepest book it has : Zarathustra ". At this point, it is no wonder that he is considered " the last disciple of Dionysos, and the Theacher of the eternal Return. The author can be judged from several angles, but, personally, I can only see it from the perspective of what he has written in his last years, when his mind had something to suffer, maybe for that I consider extremes with a high degree of relevance, in many cases. Because, as he said, " One must still have chaos in oneself, to be able to give birth to a dancing star ". View 2 comments. One of Nietzsche's later albums, the synopsis on the back of my copy states, inauspiciously, that Twilight of the Idols was recorded in , "the last sane year of Nietzsche's life"- inauspiciously that is unless you believe that great wisdom lies close to madness. The first track here is just an intro called Foreword , not a song proper at all. Nietzsche tells us that "nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part", and that he intends to conduct a revaluation of all values [italics his].. Nietzsche tells us that "nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part", and that he intends to conduct a revaluation of all values [italics his] He is going to be discussing idols- none so ancient, none so hollow. So far so interesting. The placement of track 2, Maxims and Arrows , suggests that Twilight Accompanying the noises are Nietzsche's aphorisms. Whether we immoralists do virtue any harm? As little as anarchists do princes. Only since they have been shot at do they again sit firmly on their thrones. Some of them are thought-provoking, some are funny, some are offensive. Here's one that's at least two out of three. Track 3, The Problem of Socrates - finally, a real song. On this track, Nietzsche tells us that Socrates was what he calls a declining type , i. What's Nietzsche's problem with Socrates? Well, he dislikes Socrates for having been so damn rational all the time, for having made a sort of religion out of rationality, and Nietzsche further suggests that anyone who does that must be repressing things that he doesn't want to acknowledge. If one needs to make a tyrant of reason , as Socrates did, there must exist no little danger of something else playing the tyrant. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency To have to combat one's instincts, Nietzsche says, is the formula for decadence. I was reminded naturally of Spock on Star Trek , who strictly repressed his own emotions and instincts, view spoiler [except for once every seven years during the Pon Farr, when he would go insane with horniness Leonard Nimoy also battled alcoholism for years- just a thought hide spoiler ]. Overall, a solid track with a catchy chorus that could easily be a radio single. On track 4, 'Reason' in Philosophy , Nietzsche says paraphrasing here that philosophers are mostly "conceptual idolaters" who sit around jerking off and coming up with reasons why the real world can't possibly be real. They try to escape "from becoming, from history, from falsehood According to Nietzsche, the teachings of Socrates, Kant and Christianity all have this in common. The Dionysian artist, on the other hand, "affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence", says YES; or I guess for Nietzsche that would be JA Track 5, How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth , is a quirky little interlude that traces the history of what Nietzsche regards as an erroneous idea. It's thought-provoking and made me laugh out loud with its ending self-satisfied flourish, so I've got to hand it to him. Is that a flute that comes in around the second mark? That's really what we're talking about here, isn't it? The death drive? Nietzsche, as noted above, calls it decadence, and sees it, again, in the teachings of the Church- "to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots", therefore the Church is hostile to life. As a former Catholic school student, I have to admit that I find something gratifying in the viciousness of some of these passages. If one has grasped the blasphemousness of such a rebellion against life as has, in Christian morality, become virtually sacrosanct, one has [also grasped] the falsity of such a rebellion. For a condemnation of life by the living is after all no more than the symptom of a certain kind of life Thinking back to all those masses I sat through, the familiar rituals, was I part of nothing but an anti-nature cult of decadence? Were we all really worshipping Thanatos? I can't say the thought has never occurred to me, but- this is one of the tricky things about reading Nietzsche- maybe the reason it has occurred to me, at least in so many words, is due partly to the ubiquity of Nietzsche's thought in the modern world, which I probably absorbed as a kid even before I'd read him. In the final section here, Nietzsche takes after the "pitiful journeyman moralist" who "paints himself on the wall and say ecce homo ", vainly trying to change others. Why should personal change and moral development necessarily be anti-life, unnatural? Maybe Nietzsche means that change should come from within, not under pressure from some "pitiful journeyman moralist", but is there then no such thing as genuine change as a result of interacting with a good teacher, or a work of literature? Also, if we feel the impulse to change or even to try to change others, shouldn't that impulse by Nietzsche's logic be affirmed, like all the others? This one doesn't have the feel of a radio hit, it's a bit more obscure in what it's trying to say, but it includes some of the most interesting psychological passages in the book, such as when Nietzsche discusses "the error of imaginary causes. But I believe that he is describing a tradition of trying to selectively breed certain qualities in human beings, i. I can imagine Hitler's eyes lighting up around this point, but if he had read it carefully, I think he would have been disappointed. Yes, Nietzsche says, the so-called morality that he associates with Christianity is part of a naive attempt to "improve" mankind, but trying to breed some kind of ideal race is just as naive, the other side of the same coin. But I listened to some Rammstein in the bathroom yesterday, and everything went smoothly, so to speak. So I'm not sure what Nietzsche is talking about. Finally we get to the epic track that everyone is talking about, the mammoth and light-consuming Expeditions of an Untimely Man. Is it any good? I'd say it depends on which of the 51 individual sections you're reading, as Nietzsche riffs and jazzes and shreds his way from topic to topic. Jesus there are some brutal breakdowns here, and definitely some highlights: "Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. In section 34, for example, Nietzsche explains that anarchists and socialists he uses the terms interchangeably simply enjoy the feeling of complaining, which satisfies a certain revenge they want to take upon the world- therefore it seems, in Nietzsche's conception, that any attempt at social or political reform is just narcissism. In other words: this whatever this happens to be at a given point in time, presumably is just the way it is, and it's pointless to try to change or reform it. I feel that way myself, at times. But isn't this also a kind of masochism, a kind of fatalism? Nietzsche on old age and sickness: To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, ought to entail the profound contempt of society. Physicians, in their turn, ought to be the communicators of this contempt- not prescriptions, but every day a fresh dose of disgust with their patients It would be good job security for Nietzsche too, because even if Biden and Harris win, they can just retain Nietzsche- they can have him say essentially the same things, just with a nicer tone, throw in some rhetorical bullshit about restoring the soul of America- and Nietzsche can provide ideological cover for why they'll never support universal healthcare. Later, Nietzsche continues to express some values that I'm going to be polite and refer to as conservative: I have already For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum. Didn't I read once that Nietzsche's Nazi bitch of a sister altered some of his writing years later in order to make it seem like he would have approved of the Nazis? Is it possible I got one of those copies? The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct of degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labor question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions : first imperative of instinct So here's my question for Nietzsche, and I hope he answers me here on Goodreads. Your book, quite provocative and insightful at times, seems to be about how people worship arbitrary idols without even being conscious of it. But why then do you think your readers should have such reverence for the rule of "instinct"? Why should I have any respect at all for concepts like "tradition, authority and centuries-long responsibility"? And why do you, for that matter? By the time we get to track 11, the outro, What I Owe to the Ancients , it's as if a storm has passed, although there's a sense of lingering danger and tempestuous seas. Nietzsche reiterates the connection between Socrates actually, now he's talking about Plato, but those two fellas had similar ideas, didn't they? Idols, in other words. Nietzsche finishes by re-emphasizing the necessity of offering an ecstatic YES to life, "affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems. I agree that it's good to be adaptable, to work through hardship, and that there's something powerful in the idea of being able to say YES to every experience, to accept everything as material for a creative life. And I can understand why people living in troubled times that would be all of us, now find solace and inspiration in this idea, and in Nietzsche's writing in general. I'm with him just up to the point where that affirmation becomes fatalism, an excuse for keeping things the way they are, and where the ecstatic YES becomes contempt for anyone who doesn't or can't follow suit. Probably doesn't deserve a place in the heavy metal pantheon like Schopenhauer's Forever Baptized in Eternal Fire or Kant's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son , or even Nietzsche's self-titled debut, but an album that's worth getting out of the drawer and giving a re-listen, if it's been a while. View all 8 comments. I intend to write an essay about three of the books written in by Nietzsche: the most explosive, the "crazy" ones. What I have found out, re-reading them, is that Nietzsche wasn't crazy at all when he conceived "The Twilight of Idols" for instance as some psychiatrists claim. His truths are more powerful, deeper and more energetic. There is an incredible tension but also a massive - almost unbelieveable - intuition. In his hidden, occult way pre-psychanalytic , Nietzsche is almost always I intend to write an essay about three of the books written in by Nietzsche: the most explosive, the "crazy" ones. In his hidden, occult way pre-psychanalytic , Nietzsche is almost always right. His truth may be "perverse" but it is nevertheless a strong truth. I'd rather be insane with Nietzsche than "normal" with Kant. However, because Nietzsche has written this books weeks before his mental breakdown, they are somehow mythologically charged. Before experiencing his abyss, the German writer had perhaps the most formidable intelectual adventure of all times: if Zarathustra is Everest, Genealogy of the Morals and the writtings from the fateful are a trip to Moon and Mars. The aforementioned virtual essay of mine will probably emulate Papini's tone from the "Twilight of Philosophers". May 11, Geoff marked it as to-read. Jan 07, Griffin Wilson rated it it was amazing Shelves: ph-modern , z-nietzsche. Most excellent. I could recommend this as a good place to start with Nietzsche. He wrote it at the end of his life and seems to bring a lot of ideas from different works together here: critiques of Plato and his impact on the Western tradition, of Christianity, and of "modernity" and various thinkers it produced along with bits and pieces of his solution. I doubt this chaos was natural, since he spent a lot of time thinking about the format he was about to put it with the Antichrist in one book , but there's no doubt he's the gift of writing. I can't approve all his thoughts, but among this ideas flooding, you can't remain neutral. You'll going to be there trying to rebuild what the flood has already demolished, trying to pick some new materials, strong enough to resist the Hammer of the philosopher.. More precisely: we are never understood — hence our authority. You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third case would be as a fugitive. First question of conscience. Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience. Are you one who looks on? Or one who lends a hand? Or one who looks away and walks off? Third question of conscience. Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know wh You run ahead? One must know what one wants and that one wants. Fourth question of conscience. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Nov 12, lavinia rated it did not like it Shelves: philosophy. I am most likely going to burn in reader's hell for this rating. I never really liked Nietzsche, his style always seems to influence the weak with rebellion, especially teenagers. His anger with Christianity is so big that I believe this guy is responsible for a third of today's atheists. Especially if you're in high school, this book is going to influence you a lot. He focuses on how people trust and value much more their non-sensorial traits and how the real sensors are neglected and considered I am most likely going to burn in reader's hell for this rating. He focuses on how people trust and value much more their non-sensorial traits and how the real sensors are neglected and considered perhaps too shallow he gives the nose as an example. He talks a lot about Christians and they're beliefs in heaven, about how this proofs they're dislike of the real world. He picks on Plato a lot, and later on some german philosophers. Overall, this was a drag to read, with no valuable take-aways for me. Luckily it's a short book, otherwise I would have given up for sure after the first hundred pages. View 1 comment. Sep 29, Ali Gilani rated it it was amazing. Nietzsche writes in a vague prose, and there are multiple interpretations of his texts, but I will make it simpler for me and write my first impressions of the book. I believe it is a great piece of prose. And his aphoristic style is short and curt and as the name of the book suggests, it really feels like someone is pounding you with a hammer. The blows are swift and direct. As I read an English translation much of the lyrical effect, the play on the words is left out, somewhere pointed out by Nietzsche writes in a vague prose, and there are multiple interpretations of his texts, but I will make it simpler for me and write my first impressions of the book. As I read an English translation much of the lyrical effect, the play on the words is left out, somewhere pointed out by footnotes. The book starts with his Maxims, with some of his famous ones there too. There are a lot of pithy aphorisms you will find inside the book chapters as well. But the ones in Maxims and Arrows are standalone. Then comes his chapter on Socrates.

Analysis Of Friedrich Nietzsche 's ' Twilight Of The Idols ' | Bartleby

Twilight of the Idols was written in just over a week, between 26 August and 3 September , while Nietzsche was on holiday in Sils Maria. As Nietzsche's fame and popularity were spreading both inside and outside Germany, he felt that he needed a text that would serve as a short introduction to his work. Well, I really wanted to philosophize with a hammer, but I said to myself, 'Who the heck will show me how? Alarming for a motorized scooter, anyway. I turned around in my fluorescent yellow booth at Subway, where I was busy 'enjoying' a Veggie Delite [sic], only to see a deranged-looking man with enough mustache for the entire cast of a s Well, I really wanted to philosophize with a hammer, but I said to myself, 'Who the heck will show me how? I turned around in my fluorescent yellow booth at Subway, where I was busy 'enjoying' a Veggie Delite [sic], only to see a deranged-looking man with enough mustache for the entire cast of a s gay porn film piloting his scooter directly for me! He collided with my shin and shouted like a man reciting from an eye chart across a large gymnasium, 'Did! It was very undignified. I pretended I hadn't noticed by dabbing at my mouth with my napkin and looking out the window distractedly. Eventually he got the the scooter under control, but now he was faced in the wrong direction. This didn't stop him though. With a hammer! He sighed dramatically and slumped further in his seat before turning the scooter on again. In lurches and spasms, he finally managed to turn the thing around so he was facing me. It was then that I noticed he had mustard in his mustache. The man had apparently bitch-slapped me. But I was far too shocked to be offended. I started stammering idiotically. It felt like Catholic school all over again. Every one of you! I tried to act casual and finish my Veggie Delite [sic], but every bite tasted of his bitter contempt. I wasn't sure if he had just refused to teach me to philosophize with a hammer or whether that had been the lesson. For more of my informative reflections on Nietzsche, why don't you visit my darling little blog? It's sexy and delicious. View all 29 comments. Jul 18, Rscarff rated it really liked it. Can you imagine how much fun Nietzsche must have been at parties? Guest No. Freddy: The devil is a creation of the ultimate mishap upon humankind, and this egg is a desecration of the fruit of the first instinct. Fred: I hate it. And so on. Obviously, Nietzsche had a titanic mind, and while his immoralisim is in direct conflict with my personal worldview, many of his ideas remain profound a century and a half later. That he d Can you imagine how much fun Nietzsche must have been at parties? That he declares this his immodest intention should come as no surprise by the time you read this declaration in the last part of the book. Dec 08, joycesu rated it really liked it. This book frustrated me beyond comprehension. I hated him so vehemently for many different reasons: He whines incessantly about things like the downfall of German intellectualism, yet offers no solution. He "critiques" a great many other philosopher , writer, or artist, but offers little to no actual insight to the "idol;" he simply alludes to their "stupidity," much like a child with a chip on his shoulder. His style of writing is disjointed and hard to follow this could be my translation too tho This book frustrated me beyond comprehension. His style of writing is disjointed and hard to follow this could be my translation too though. I found his thought and writing patterns to be erratic, contradictory at times , and often incomplete. He comes off as pompous and completely arrogant as well. Along with this I just felt totally berated as a reader with his abrasive tone: even when I wanted to agree with him, I still felt like I was being punished. My desire to dig out his hypocrisy, only inspired me to further research the subjects in question. For this, I am happy as I find immense pleasure in learning. I also have a whole new set of books to read. I found a lot of his insights that I DID agree with to be interesting, and since his personality is so deeply embedded in his writing, I was also incredibly entertained by his profoundly rooted nihilism. I food myself chuckling and thinking, "is this guy for REAL? Sure, it was seething hatred and apocalyptic accusations, but I FELT something inside my mind explode. Often times while I'm reading I'll find myself in blissful complacency, agreeing and absorbing. Nietzsche really got me so angry to the point where I questioned a lot of my own philosophies and most epically, WHY I disagreed with his. Ultimately the book served its purpose, so for that, I have to say I rather enjoyed it. I, however, still dislike Nietzsche View all 7 comments. Upon reading the reviews here, it surprises me how many people misunderstand what Nietzsche is saying; he is definitely not a nihilist. Rather, he affirms life. An example would be where he talks of freedom. You gain freedom by affirming life, in spite of the pain and suffering that comes with life strikes me as Buddhist. I might add that the point in philosophy isn't whether or not you agree with what is being stated. It's how it affects you. View all 3 comments. Nietzsche has a strange effect on me, in that his ideas resonate in my mind when I go through a bad day, otherwise - will see The aura of negative theology has always accompanied Nietzsche's thinking. Perceived as a destroyer of idols, as an opponent to the cultural tradition, as an iconoclast to any spiritual authority other than that of one's own spirit, as " the greatest assassin of God ", - he raises statues, in his work, to other new idols. The values by which the philosophers were guid Nietzsche has a strange effect on me, in that his ideas resonate in my mind when I go through a bad day, otherwise - will see That of appearance, where the body is more valuable than the intellect? Quite frightening We also find that " civilization has fallen because it has been subjugated by the Christian religion, and, in this time, no other god has been created. Almost two thousand years, and no other new god ". Nietzsche leave the impression that he wants to become an idol, an prophet, to announce a new era of culture : " I gave to humanity the deepest book it has : Zarathustra ". At this point, it is no wonder that he is considered " the last disciple of Dionysos, and the Theacher of the eternal Return. The author can be judged from several angles, but, personally, I can only see it from the perspective of what he has written in his last years, when his mind had something to suffer, maybe for that I consider extremes with a high degree of relevance, in many cases. Because, as he said, " One must still have chaos in oneself, to be able to give birth to a dancing star ". View 2 comments. One of Nietzsche's later albums, the synopsis on the back of my copy states, inauspiciously, that Twilight of the Idols was recorded in , "the last sane year of Nietzsche's life"- inauspiciously that is unless you believe that great wisdom lies close to madness. The first track here is just an intro called Foreword , not a song proper at all. Nietzsche tells us that "nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part", and that he intends to conduct a revaluation of all values [italics his].. Nietzsche tells us that "nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part", and that he intends to conduct a revaluation of all values [italics his] He is going to be discussing idols- none so ancient, none so hollow. So far so interesting. The placement of track 2, Maxims and Arrows , suggests that Twilight Accompanying the noises are Nietzsche's aphorisms. Whether we immoralists do virtue any harm? As little as anarchists do princes. Only since they have been shot at do they again sit firmly on their thrones. Some of them are thought-provoking, some are funny, some are offensive. Here's one that's at least two out of three. Track 3, The Problem of Socrates - finally, a real song. On this track, Nietzsche tells us that Socrates was what he calls a declining type , i. What's Nietzsche's problem with Socrates? Well, he dislikes Socrates for having been so damn rational all the time, for having made a sort of religion out of rationality, and Nietzsche further suggests that anyone who does that must be repressing things that he doesn't want to acknowledge. If one needs to make a tyrant of reason , as Socrates did, there must exist no little danger of something else playing the tyrant. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency To have to combat one's instincts, Nietzsche says, is the formula for decadence. I was reminded naturally of Spock on Star Trek , who strictly repressed his own emotions and instincts, view spoiler [except for once every seven years during the Pon Farr, when he would go insane with horniness Leonard Nimoy also battled alcoholism for years- just a thought hide spoiler ]. Overall, a solid track with a catchy chorus that could easily be a radio single. On track 4, 'Reason' in Philosophy , Nietzsche says paraphrasing here that philosophers are mostly "conceptual idolaters" who sit around jerking off and coming up with reasons why the real world can't possibly be real. They try to escape "from becoming, from history, from falsehood According to Nietzsche, the teachings of Socrates, Kant and Christianity all have this in common. The Dionysian artist, on the other hand, "affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence", says YES; or I guess for Nietzsche that would be JA Track 5, How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth , is a quirky little interlude that traces the history of what Nietzsche regards as an erroneous idea. It's thought-provoking and made me laugh out loud with its ending self-satisfied flourish, so I've got to hand it to him. Is that a flute that comes in around the second mark? That's really what we're talking about here, isn't it? The death drive? Nietzsche, as noted above, calls it decadence, and sees it, again, in the teachings of the Church- "to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots", therefore the Church is hostile to life. As a former Catholic school student, I have to admit that I find something gratifying in the viciousness of some of these passages. If one has grasped the blasphemousness of such a rebellion against life as has, in Christian morality, become virtually sacrosanct, one has [also grasped] the falsity of such a rebellion. For a condemnation of life by the living is after all no more than the symptom of a certain kind of life Thinking back to all those masses I sat through, the familiar rituals, was I part of nothing but an anti-nature cult of decadence? Were we all really worshipping Thanatos? I can't say the thought has never occurred to me, but- this is one of the tricky things about reading Nietzsche- maybe the reason it has occurred to me, at least in so many words, is due partly to the ubiquity of Nietzsche's thought in the modern world, which I probably absorbed as a kid even before I'd read him. In the final section here, Nietzsche takes after the "pitiful journeyman moralist" who "paints himself on the wall and say ecce homo ", vainly trying to change others. Why should personal change and moral development necessarily be anti-life, unnatural? Maybe Nietzsche means that change should come from within, not under pressure from some "pitiful journeyman moralist", but is there then no such thing as genuine change as a result of interacting with a good teacher, or a work of literature? Also, if we feel the impulse to change or even to try to change others, shouldn't that impulse by Nietzsche's logic be affirmed, like all the others? This one doesn't have the feel of a radio hit, it's a bit more obscure in what it's trying to say, but it includes some of the most interesting psychological passages in the book, such as when Nietzsche discusses "the error of imaginary causes. But I believe that he is describing a tradition of trying to selectively breed certain qualities in human beings, i. I can imagine Hitler's eyes lighting up around this point, but if he had read it carefully, I think he would have been disappointed. Yes, Nietzsche says, the so-called morality that he associates with Christianity is part of a naive attempt to "improve" mankind, but trying to breed some kind of ideal race is just as naive, the other side of the same coin. But I listened to some Rammstein in the bathroom yesterday, and everything went smoothly, so to speak. So I'm not sure what Nietzsche is talking about. Finally we get to the epic track that everyone is talking about, the mammoth and light-consuming Expeditions of an Untimely Man. Is it any good? I'd say it depends on which of the 51 individual sections you're reading, as Nietzsche riffs and jazzes and shreds his way from topic to topic. Jesus there are some brutal breakdowns here, and definitely some highlights: "Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. In section 34, for example, Nietzsche explains that anarchists and socialists he uses the terms interchangeably simply enjoy the feeling of complaining, which satisfies a certain revenge they want to take upon the world- therefore it seems, in Nietzsche's conception, that any attempt at social or political reform is just narcissism. In other words: this whatever this happens to be at a given point in time, presumably is just the way it is, and it's pointless to try to change or reform it. I feel that way myself, at times. But isn't this also a kind of masochism, a kind of fatalism? Nietzsche on old age and sickness: To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, ought to entail the profound contempt of society. Physicians, in their turn, ought to be the communicators of this contempt- not prescriptions, but every day a fresh dose of disgust with their patients It would be good job security for Nietzsche too, because even if Biden and Harris win, they can just retain Nietzsche- they can have him say essentially the same things, just with a nicer tone, throw in some rhetorical bullshit about restoring the soul of America- and Nietzsche can provide ideological cover for why they'll never support universal healthcare. Later, Nietzsche continues to express some values that I'm going to be polite and refer to as conservative: I have already For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum. Didn't I read once that Nietzsche's Nazi bitch of a sister altered some of his writing years later in order to make it seem like he would have approved of the Nazis? Is it possible I got one of those copies? The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct of degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labor question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions : first imperative of instinct So here's my question for Nietzsche, and I hope he answers me here on Goodreads. Your book, quite provocative and insightful at times, seems to be about how people worship arbitrary idols without even being conscious of it. But why then do you think your readers should have such reverence for the rule of "instinct"? Why should I have any respect at all for concepts like "tradition, authority and centuries-long responsibility"? And why do you, for that matter? By the time we get to track 11, the outro, What I Owe to the Ancients , it's as if a storm has passed, although there's a sense of lingering danger and tempestuous seas. Nietzsche reiterates the connection between Socrates actually, now he's talking about Plato, but those two fellas had similar ideas, didn't they? Idols, in other words. Nietzsche finishes by re-emphasizing the necessity of offering an ecstatic YES to life, "affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems. I agree that it's good to be adaptable, to work through hardship, and that there's something powerful in the idea of being able to say YES to every experience, to accept everything as material for a creative life. And I can understand why people living in troubled times that would be all of us, now find solace and inspiration in this idea, and in Nietzsche's writing in general. I'm with him just up to the point where that affirmation becomes fatalism, an excuse for keeping things the way they are, and where the ecstatic YES becomes contempt for anyone who doesn't or can't follow suit. Probably doesn't deserve a place in the heavy metal pantheon like Schopenhauer's Forever Baptized in Eternal Fire or Kant's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son , or even Nietzsche's self-titled debut, but an album that's worth getting out of the drawer and giving a re- listen, if it's been a while. View all 8 comments. I intend to write an essay about three of the books written in by Nietzsche: the most explosive, the "crazy" ones. What I have found out, re-reading them, is that Nietzsche wasn't crazy at all when he conceived "The Twilight of Idols" for instance as some psychiatrists claim. His truths are more powerful, deeper and more energetic. There is an incredible tension but also a massive - almost unbelieveable - intuition. In his hidden, occult way pre-psychanalytic , Nietzsche is almost always I intend to write an essay about three of the books written in by Nietzsche: the most explosive, the "crazy" ones. In his hidden, occult way pre-psychanalytic , Nietzsche is almost always right. His truth may be "perverse" but it is nevertheless a strong truth. I'd rather be insane with Nietzsche than "normal" with Kant. However, because Nietzsche has written this books weeks before his mental breakdown, they are somehow mythologically charged. Before experiencing his abyss, the German writer had perhaps the most formidable intelectual adventure of all times: if Zarathustra is Everest, Genealogy of the Morals and the writtings from the fateful are a trip to Moon and Mars. People will feel grateful to me if I condense a point of view, which is at once so important and so new, into four theses: by this means I shall facilitate comprehension, and shall likewise challenge contradiction. Proposition One. The reasons upon which the apparent nature of "this" world have been based, rather tend to prove its reality,—any other kind of reality defies demonstration. Proposition Two. The characteristics with which man has endowed the "true Being" of things, are the characteristics of non-Being, of nonentity. The "true world" has been erected upon a contradiction of the real world; and it is indeed an apparent world, seeing that it is merely a moralo- optical delusion. Proposition Three. There is no sense in spinning yarns about another world, provided, of course, that we do not possess a mighty instinct which urges us to slander, belittle, and cast suspicion upon this life: in this case we should be avenging ourselves on [Pg 23] this life with the phantasmagoria of "another," of a "better" life. Proposition Four. To divide the world into a "true" and an "apparent" world, whether after the manner of Christianity or of Kant after all a Christian in disguise , is only a sign of decadence,—a symptom of degenerating life. The fact that the artist esteems the appearance of a thing higher than reality, is no objection to this statement For "appearance" signifies once more reality here, but in a selected, strengthened and corrected form. The tragic artist is no pessimist,—he says Yea to everything questionable and terrible, he is Dionysian. The true world, attainable to the sage, the pious man and the man of virtue,—he lives in it, he is it. The most ancient form of the idea was relatively clever, simple, convincing. It was a paraphrase of the proposition "I, Plato, am the truth. The true world which is unattainable for the moment, is promised to the sage, to the pious man and to the man of virtue "to the sinner who repents". Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, more insidious, more evasive,—It becomes a woman, it becomes Christian. The true world is unattainable, it cannot be proved, it cannot promise anything; but even as a thought, alone, it is a comfort, an obligation, a command. The true world—is it unattainable? At all events it is unattained. And as unattained it is also unknown. Consequently it no longer comforts, nor saves, nor constrains: what could something unknown constrain us to? The grey of dawn. Reason stretches itself and yawns for the first time. The cock-crow of positivism. The "true world"—an idea that no longer serves any purpose, that no longer constrains one to anything,—a useless idea that has become quite superfluous, consequently an exploded idea: let us abolish it! Bright daylight; breakfast; the return of common sense and of cheerfulness; Plato blushes for shame and all free-spirits kick up a shindy. We have suppressed the true world: what world survives? Certainly not! In abolishing the true world we have also abolished the world of appearance! Noon; the moment of the shortest shadows; the end of the longest error; mankind's zenith; Incipit Zarathustra. There is a time when all passions are simply fatal in their action, when they wreck their victims with the weight of their folly,—and there is a later period, a very much later period, when they marry with the spirit, when they "spiritualise" themselves. Formerly, owing to the stupidity inherent in passion, men waged war against passion itself: men pledged themselves to annihilate it,—all ancient moral-mongers were unanimous on this point, " il faut tuer les passions. It is said there, for instance, with an application to sexuality: "if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out": fortunately no Christian acts in obedience to this precept. To annihilate the passions and desires, simply on account of their stupidity, and to obviate the unpleasant consequences of their stupidity, seems to us to-day merely an aggravated form of stupidity. We no longer admire those dentists who extract teeth simply in order that they may not ache again. On the other hand, it will be admitted with some reason, that on the soil from which Christianity grew, the idea of [Pg 27] the "spiritualisation of passion" could not possibly have been conceived. The early Church, as everyone knows, certainly did wage war against the "intelligent," in favour of the "poor in spirit" In these circumstances how could the passions be combated intelligently? The Church combats passion by means of excision of all kinds: its practice, its "remedy," is castration. It never inquires "how can a desire be spiritualised, beautified, deified? The same means, castration and extirpation, are instinctively chosen for waging war against a passion, by those who are too weak of will, too degenerate, to impose some sort of moderation upon it; by those natures who, to speak in metaphor —and without metaphor , need la Trappe, or some kind of ultimatum of war, a gulf set between themselves and a passion. Only degenerates find radical methods indispensable: weakness of will, or more strictly speaking, the inability not to react to a stimulus, is in itself simply another form of degeneracy. Radical and mortal hostility to sensuality, remains a suspicious symptom: it justifies one in being suspicious of the general state of one who goes to such extremes. Moreover, that hostility and hatred reach their height only when such natures no longer possess enough strength of character to adopt the [Pg 28] radical remedy, to renounce their inner "Satan. The spiritualisation of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity. Another triumph is our spiritualisation of hostility. It consists in the fact that we are beginning to realise very profoundly the value of having enemies: in short that with them we are forced to do and to conclude precisely the reverse of what we previously did and concluded. In all ages the Church wished to annihilate its enemies: we, the immoralists and Antichrists, see our advantage in the survival of the Church. Even in political life, hostility has now become more spiritual,—much more cautious, much more thoughtful, and much more moderate. Almost every party sees its self-preservative interests in preventing the Opposition from going to pieces; and the same applies to politics on a grand scale. A new creation, more particularly, like the new Empire, has more need of enemies than friends: only as a contrast does it begin to feel necessary, only as a contrast does it become necessary. And we behave in precisely the same way to the "inner enemy": in this quarter too we have spiritualised enmity, in this quarter too we have understood its value. A man is productive only in so far as he is rich in contrasted instincts; he can remain young only on [Pg 29] condition that his soul does not begin to take things easy and to yearn for peace. Nothing has grown more alien to us than that old desire—the "peace of the soul," which is the aim of Christianity. Nothing could make us less envious than the moral cow and the plump happiness of a clean conscience. The man who has renounced war has renounced a grand life. In many cases, of course, "peace of the soul" is merely a misunderstanding,—it is something very different which has failed to find a more honest name for itself. Without either circumlocution or prejudice I will suggest a few cases. Or the first presage of weariness, the first shadow that evening, every kind of evening, is wont to cast. Or a sign that the air is moist, and that winds are blowing up from the south. Or unconscious gratitude for a good digestion sometimes called "brotherly love". Or the serenity of the convalescent, on whose lips all things have a new taste, and who bides his time. Or the condition which follows upon a thorough gratification of our strongest passion, the well-being of unaccustomed satiety. Or the senility of our will, of our desires, and of our vices. Or laziness, coaxed by vanity into togging itself out in a moral garb. Or the ending of a state of long suspense and of agonising uncertainty, by a state of certainty, of even terrible certainty. Or the expression of ripeness and mastery in the midst of a task, of a creative work, of a production, of a thing willed, the calm breathing that denotes that "freedom of will" has been attained. I will formulate a principle. All naturalism in morality—that is to say, every sound morality is ruled by a life instinct,—any one of the laws of life is fulfilled by the definite canon "thou shalt," "thou shalt not," and any sort of obstacle or hostile element in the road of life is thus cleared away. Conversely, the morality which is antagonistic to nature—that is to say, almost every morality that has been taught, honoured and preached hitherto, is directed precisely against the life-instincts,—it is a condemnation, now secret, now blatant and impudent, of these very instincts. Inasmuch as it says "God sees into the heart of man," it says Nay to the profoundest and most superior desires of life and takes God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God is well pleased, is the ideal eunuch. Life terminates where the "Kingdom of God" begins. Admitting that you have understood the villainy of such a mutiny against life as that which has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality, you have fortunately understood something besides; and that is the futility, the fictitiousness, the absurdity and the falseness of such a mutiny. For the condemnation of life by a living creature is after all but the symptom of a definite kind of life: the question as to whether the condemnation is justified or the reverse is not even raised. In order even to approach the problem of the value of life, a man would need [Pg 31] to be placed outside life, and moreover know it as well as one, as many, as all in fact, who have lived it These are reasons enough to prove to us that this problem is an inaccessible one to us. When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, and through the optics of life: life itself urges us to determine values: life itself values through us when we determine values. From which it follows that even that morality which is antagonistic to life, and which conceives God as the opposite and the condemnation of life, is only a valuation of life—of what life? But I have already answered this question: it is the valuation of declining, of enfeebled, of exhausted and of condemned life. Morality, as it has been understood hitherto—as it was finally formulated by Schopenhauer in the words "The Denial of the Will to Life," is the instinct of degeneration itself, which converts itself into an imperative: it says: "Perish! Let us at last consider how exceedingly simple it is on our part to say: "Man should be thus and thus! Man should be different! The individual in his past and future is a piece of fate, one law the more, one necessity the more for all that is to come and is to be. To say to him "change thyself," is tantamount to saying that everything should change, even backwards as well. Truly these have been consistent moralists, they wished man to be different, i. And to this end they denied the world! No slight form of insanity! No modest form of immodesty! Morality, in so far it condemns per se, and not out of any aim, consideration or motive of life, is a specific error, for which no one should feel any mercy, a degenerate idiosyncrasy, that has done an unutterable amount of harm. We others, we immoralists, on the contrary, have opened our hearts wide to all kinds of comprehension, understanding and approbation. Our eyes have opened ever wider and wider to that economy which still employs and knows how to use to its own advantage all that which the sacred craziness of priests and the morbid reason in priests, rejects; to that economy in the law of life which draws its own advantage even out of the repulsive race of bigots, the priests and the virtuous,—what advantage? Spinoza, who says in the Tractatus politico , Chap. The error of the confusion of cause and effect. Nevertheless this error is one of the most ancient and most recent habits of mankind. In one part of the world it has even been canonised; and it bears the name of "Religion" and "Morality. Everybody knows the book of the famous Cornaro, in which he recommends his slender diet as the recipe for a long, happy and also virtuous life. Few books have been so widely read, and to this day many thousand copies of it are still printed annually in England. I do not doubt that there is scarcely a single book the Bible of course excepted that has worked more mischief, shortened more lives, than this well-meant curiosity. The reason of this is the confusion of effect and cause. This worthy Italian saw the cause of his long life in his diet: whereas the prerequisites of long life, which are exceptional slowness of molecular change, and a low rate of expenditure in energy, were the cause of his meagre [Pg 34] diet He was not at liberty to eat a small or a great amount. His frugality was not the result of free choice, he would have been ill had he eaten more. He who does not happen to be a carp, however, is not only wise to eat well, but is also compelled to do so. A scholar of the present day, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would soon go to the dogs on Cornaro's diet Crede experto. The most general principle lying at the root of every religion and morality, is this: "Do this and that and avoid this and that—and thou wilt be happy. In my mouth this principle is converted into its opposite—first example of my "Transvaluation of all Values": a well-constituted man, a man who is one of "Nature's lucky strokes," must perform certain actions and instinctively fear other actions; he introduces the element of order, of which he is the physiological manifestation, into his relations with men and things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his good constitution. Longevity and plentiful offspring are not the reward of virtue, virtue itself is on the contrary that retardation of the metabolic process which, among other things, results in a long life and in plentiful offspring, in short in Cornarism. The Church and morality say: "A race, a people perish through vice and luxury. His friends say this or that illness is the cause of it I say: the fact that he became ill, the fact that he did not resist illness, was in itself already the outcome of impoverished life, of hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: such and such a party by committing such an error will meet its death. My superior politics say: a party that can make such mistakes, is in its last agony—it no longer possesses any certainty of instinct. Every mistake is in every sense the sequel to degeneration of the instincts, to disintegration of the will. This is almost the definition of evil, Everything valuable is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free. Exertion is an objection, the god is characteristically different from the hero in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity. The error of false causality. In all ages men have believed that they knew what a cause was: but whence did we derive this knowledge, or more accurately, this faith in the fact that we know? Out of the realm of the famous "inner facts of consciousness," not one of which has yet proved itself to be a fact We believed ourselves to be causes even in the action of the will; we thought that in this matter at least we caught causality red-handed. No one [Pg 36] doubted that all the antecedentia of an action were to be sought in consciousness, and could be discovered there—as "motive"—if only they were sought. Otherwise we should not be free to perform them, we should not have been responsible for them. Finally who would have questioned that a thought is caused? Of these three "facts of inner consciousness" by means of which causality seemed to be guaranteed, the first and most convincing is that of the will as cause; the conception of consciousness "spirit" as a cause, and subsequently that of the ego the "subject" as a cause, were merely born afterwards, once the causality of the will stood established as "given," as a fact of experience. Meanwhile we have come to our senses. To-day we no longer believe a word of all this. The "inner world" is full of phantoms and will-o'-the- wisps: the will is one of these. The will no longer actuates, consequently it no longer explains anything—all it does is to accompany processes; it may even be absent. The so-called "motive" is another error. It is merely a ripple on the surface of consciousness, a side issue of the action, which is much more likely to conceal than to reveal the antecedentia of the latter. And as for the ego! It has become legendary, fictional, a play upon words: it has ceased utterly and completely from thinking, feeling, and willing! What is the result of it all? There are no such things as spiritual causes. The whole of popular experience on this subject went to the devil! That is the result of it all. For we had blissfully abused that experience, we had built the world upon it as a world of causes, as a world [Pg 37] of will, as a world of spirit. The most antiquated and most traditional psychology has been at work here, it has done nothing else: all phenomena were deeds in the light of this psychology, and all deeds were the result of will; according to it the world was a complex mechanism of agents, an agent a "subject" lay at the root of all things. Man projected his three "inner facts of consciousness," the will, the spirit, and the ego in which he believed most firmly, outside himself. He first deduced the concept Being out of the concept Ego, he supposed "things" to exist as he did himself, according to his notion of the ego as cause. Was it to be wondered at that later on he always found in things only that which he had laid in them? And even your atom, my dear good Mechanists and Physicists, what an amount of error, of rudimentary psychology still adheres to it! The error of spirit regarded as a cause, confounded with reality! And made the measure of reality! And called God! The Error of imaginary Causes. Starting out from dreamland, we find that to any definite sensation, like that produced by a distant cannon shot for instance, we are wont to ascribe a cause after the fact very often quite a little romance in which the dreamer himself is, of course, the hero. Meanwhile the sensation becomes protracted like a sort of [Pg 38] continuous echo, until, as it were, the instinct of causality allows it to come to the front rank, no longer however as a chance occurrence, but as a thing which has some meaning. The cannon shot presents itself in a causal manner, by means of an apparent reversal in the order of time. That which occurs last, the motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details which flash past like lightning, and the shot is the result. What has happened? The ideas suggested by a particular state of our senses, are misinterpreted as the cause of that state. As a matter of fact we proceed in precisely the same manner when we are awake. The greater number of our general sensations—every kind of obstacle, pressure, tension, explosion in the interplay of the organs, and more particularly the condition of the nervus sympathies —stimulate our instinct of causality: we will have a reason which will account for our feeling thus or thus,—for feeling ill or well. We are never satisfied by merely ascertaining the fact that we feel thus or thus: we admit this fact—we become conscious of it—only when we have attributed it to some kind of motivation. Memory, which, in such circumstances unconsciously becomes active, adduces former conditions of a like kind, together with the causal interpretations with which they are associated,—but not their real cause. The belief that the ideas, the accompanying processes of consciousness, have been the causes, is certainly produced by the agency of memory. And in this way we become accustomed to a particular interpretation of causes which, truth to tell, actually hinders and even utterly prevents the investigation of the proper cause. The Psychological Explanation of the above Fact. To trace something unfamiliar back to something familiar, is at once a relief, a comfort and a satisfaction, while it also produces a feeling of power. The unfamiliar involves danger, anxiety and care,—the fundamental instinct is to get rid of these painful circumstances. First principle: any explanation is better than none at all. Since, at bottom, it is only a question of shaking one's self free from certain oppressive ideas, the means employed to this end are not selected with overmuch punctiliousness: the first idea by means of which the unfamiliar is revealed as familiar, produces a feeling of such comfort that it is "held to be true. The instinct of causality is therefore conditioned and stimulated by the feeling of fear. Whenever possible, the question "why? The first result of this need is that something known or already experienced, and recorded in the memory, is posited as the cause. The new factor, that which has not been experienced and which is unfamiliar, is excluded from the sphere of causes. Not only do we try to find a certain kind of explanation as the cause, but those kinds of explanations are selected and preferred which dissipate most rapidly the sensation of strangeness, novelty and unfamiliarity,—in fact the most ordinary explanations. And the result is that a certain manner of postulating causes tends to predominate ever more and more, becomes concentrated [Pg 40] into a system, and finally reigns supreme, to the complete exclusion of all other causes and explanations. The banker thinks immediately of business, the Christian of "sin," and the girl of her love affair. These sensations are dependent upon certain creatures who are hostile to us evil spirits: the most famous example of this—the mistaking of hysterical women for witches. These sensations are dependent upon actions which are reprehensible the feeling of "sin," "sinfulness" is a manner of accounting for a certain physiological disorder—people always find reasons for being dissatisfied with themselves. These sensations depend upon punishment, upon compensation for something which we ought not to have done, which we ought not to have been this idea was generalised in a more impudent form by Schopenhauer, into that principle in which morality appears in its real colours,—that is to say, as a veritable poisoner and slanderer of life: "all great suffering, whether mental or physical, reveals what we deserve: for it could not visit us if we did not deserve it," "The World as Will and Idea," vol. These sensations are the outcome of ill-considered actions, having evil consequences, —the passions, the senses, postulated as causes, as guilty. By means of other calamities distressing physiological conditions are interpreted as "merited". These sensations are [Pg 41] dependent upon a trust in God. They may depend upon our consciousness of having done one or two good actions a so-called "good conscience" is a physiological condition, which may be the outcome of good digestion. They may depend upon the happy issue of certain undertakings —an ingenuous mistake: the happy issue of an undertaking certainly does not give a hypochondriac or a Pascal any general sensation of pleasure. They may depend upon faith, love and hope,—the Christian virtues. As a matter of fact all these pretended explanations are but the results of certain states, and as it were translations of feelings of pleasure and pain into a false dialect: a man is in a condition of hopefulness because the dominant physiological sensation of his being is again one of strength and wealth; he trusts in God because the feeling of abundance and power gives him a peaceful state of mind. Morality and religion are completely and utterly parts of the psychology of error: in every particular case cause and effect are confounded; as truth is confounded with the effect of that which is believed to be true; or a certain state of consciousness is confounded with the chain of causes which brought it about. The Error of Free-Will. At present we no longer have any mercy upon the concept "free-will": we know only too well what it is—the most egregious theological trick that has ever existed for the purpose of making mankind "responsible" in a theological manner,—that is to say, to make mankind dependent upon theologians. I will now explain to you only [Pg 42] the psychology of the whole process of inculcating the sense of responsibility. Wherever men try to trace responsibility home to anyone, it is the instinct of punishment and of the desire to judge which is active. Becoming is robbed of its innocence when any particular condition of things is traced to a will, to intentions and to responsible actions. The doctrine of the will was invented principally for the purpose of punishment,—that is to say, with the intention of tracing guilt. The whole of ancient psychology, or the psychology of the will, is the outcome of the fact that its originators, who were the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves a right to administer punishments—or the right for God to do so. Men were thought of as "free" in order that they might be judged and punished—in order that they might be held guilty: consequently every action had to be regarded as voluntary, and the origin of every action had to be imagined as lying in consciousness —inthis way the most fundamentally fraudulent character of psychology was established as the very principle of psychology itself. Now that we have entered upon the opposite movement, now that we immoralists are trying with all our power to eliminate the concepts of guilt and punishment from the world once more, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature and all social institutions and customs of all signs of those two concepts, we recognise no more radical opponents than the theologians, who with their notion of "a moral order of things," still continue to pollute the innocence of Becoming with punishment and guilt Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman. What then, alone, can our teaching be? No one is responsible for the fact that he exists at all, that he is constituted as he is, and that he happens to be in certain circumstances and in a particular environment. The fatality of his being cannot be divorced from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. This is not the result of an individual intention, of a will, of an aim, there is no attempt at attaining to any "ideal man," or "ideal happiness" or "ideal morality" with him,—it is absurd to wish him to be careering towards some sort of purpose. We invented the concept "purpose"; in reality purpose is altogether lacking. One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole,—there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, and condemn our existence, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing and condemning the whole. But there is nothing outside the whole! The fact that no one shall any longer be made responsible, that the nature of existence may not be traced to a causa prima , that the world is an entity neither as a sensorium nor as a spirit— this alone is the great deliverance ,—thus alone is the innocence of Becoming restored The concept "God" has been the greatest objection to existence hitherto We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: thus alone do we save the world. You are aware of my demand upon philosophers, that they should take up a stand Beyond Good and Evil,—that they should have the illusion of the moral judgment beneath them. This demand is the result of a point of view which I was the first to formulate: that there are no such things as moral facts. Moral judgment has this in common with the religious one, that it believes in realities which are not real. Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena: or, more strictly speaking, a misinterpretation of them. Moral judgment, like the religious one, belongs to a stage of ignorance in which even the concept of reality, the distinction between real and imagined things, is still lacking: so that truth, at such a stage, is applied to a host of things which to-day we call "imaginary. As a sign code, however, it is invaluable: to him at least who knows, it reveals the most valuable facts concerning cultures and inner conditions, which did not know enough to "understand" themselves. Morality is merely a sign-language, simply symptomatology: one must already know what it is all about in order to turn it to any use. Let me give you one example, quite provisionally. In all ages there have been people who wished to "improve" mankind: this above all is what was called morality. But the most different tendencies are concealed beneath the same word. Both the taming of the beast man, and the rearing of a particular type of man, have been called "improvement": these zoological termini, alone, represent real things—real things of which the typical "improver," the priest, naturally knows nothing, and will know nothing. To call the taming of an animal "improving" it, sounds to our ears almost like a joke. He who knows what goes on in menageries, doubts very much whether an animal is improved in such places. It is certainly weakened, it is made less dangerous, and by means of the depressing influence of fear, pain, wounds, and hunger, it is converted into a sick animal. And the same holds good of the tamed man whom the priest has "improved. He looked like a caricature of man, like an abortion: he had become a "sinner," he was caged up, he had been imprisoned behind a host of apparling notions. He now lay there, sick, wretched, malevolent even toward himself: full of hate for the [Pg 46] instincts of life, full of suspicion in regard to all that is still strong and happy. In short a "Christian. The Church undersood this: it ruined man, it made him weak,—but it laid claim to having "improved" him. Now let us consider the other case which is called morality, the case of the rearing of a particular race and species. The most magnificent example of this is offered by Indian morality, and is sanctioned religiously as the "Law of Manu. It is quite obvious that we are no longer in a circus watching tamers of wild animals in this book. To have conceived even the plan of such a breeding scheme, presupposes the existence of a man who is a hundred times milder and more reasonable than the mere lion-tamer. One breathes more freely, after stepping out of the Christian atmosphere of hospitals and prisons, into this more salubrious, loftier and more spacious world. What a wretched thing the New Testament is beside Manu, what an evil odour hangs around it! And once again it had no other means of making him weak and harmless, than by making him sick,—it was the struggle with the greatest [Pg 47] "number. The third edict, for instance Avadana-Sastra I. The same edict declares that the water which they need must be drawn neither out of rivers, wells or ponds, but only out of the ditches leading to swamps and out of the holes left by the footprints of animals. They are likewise forbidden to wash either their linen or themselves since the water which is graciously granted to them must only be used for quenching their thirst. Finally Sudra women are forbidden to assist Chandala women at their confinements, while Chandala women are also forbidden to assist each other at such times. The results of sanitary regulations of this kind could not fail to make themselves felt; deadly epidemics and the most ghastly venereal diseases soon appeared, and in consequence of these again "the Law of the Knife,"—that is to say circumcision, was prescribed for male children and the removal of the small labia from the females. Manu himself says: "the Chandala are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime —this is the necessary consequence of the idea of breeding. Their clothes shall consist only of the rags torn from corpses, their vessels shall be the fragments of broken pottery, their ornaments shall be made of old iron, and their religion shall be the worship of evil spirits; without rest they shall wander from place to place. These regulations are instructive enough: we can see in them the absolutely pure and primeval humanity of the Aryans,—we learn that the notion "pure blood," is the reverse of harmless. On the other hand it becomes clear among which people the hatred, the Chandala hatred of this humanity has been immortalised, among which people it has become religion and genius. From this point of view the gospels are documents of the highest value; and the Book of Enoch is still more so. Christianity as sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as grown upon this soil, represents the counter-movement against that morality of breeding, of race and of privilege:—it is essentially an anti-Aryan religion: Christianity is the transvaluation of all Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values, the proclaimed gospel of the poor and of the low, the general insurrection of all the down-trodden, the wretched, the bungled and the botched, against the "race,"—the immortal revenge of the Chandala as the religion of love. The morality of breeding and the morality of taming, in the means which they adopt in order to prevail, are quite worthy of each other: we may lay down as a leading principle that in order to create morality a man must have the absolute will to [Pg 49] immorality. This is the great and strange problem with which I have so long been occupied: the psychology of the "Improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom perfectly insignificant fact, known as the "pia fraus," first gave me access to this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improve" mankind. Neither Manu, nor Plato, nor Confucius, nor the teachers of Judaism and Christianity, have ever doubted their right to falsehood. They have never doubted their right to quite a number of other things To express oneself in a formula, one might say:—all means which have been used heretofore with the object of making man moral, were through and through immoral. Among Germans at the present day it does not suffice to have intellect; one is actually forced to appropriate it, to lay claim to it. Maybe I know the Germans, perhaps I may tell them a few home-truths. Modern Germany represents such an enormous store of inherited and acquired capacity, that for some time it might spend this accumulated treasure even with some prodigality. It is no superior culture that has ultimately become prevalent with this modern tendency, nor is it by any means delicate taste, or noble beauty of the instincts; but rather a number of virtues more manly than any that other European countries can show. An amount of good spirits and self-respect, plenty of firmness in human relations and in the reciprocity of duties; much industry and much perseverance—and a certain inherited soberness which is much more in need of a spur than of a brake. Let me add that in this country people still obey without feeling that obedience humiliates. And no one despises his opponent. You observe that it is my desire to be fair to the Germans: and in this respect I should not like to be untrue to myself,—I must therefore also state my objections to them. It costs a good deal to [Pg 51] attain to a position of power; for power stultifies. The Germans—they were once called a people of thinkers: do they really think at all at present? Nowadays the Germans are bored by intellect, they mistrust intellect; politics have swallowed up all earnestness for really intellectual things—"Germany, Germany above all. Are there any German poets? Are there any good German books? I blush; but with that pluck which is peculiar to me, even in moments of desperation, I reply: "Yes, Bismarck! Cursed instinct of mediocrity! What might not German intellect have been! But this nation has deliberately stultified itself for almost a thousand years: nowhere else have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been so viciously abused as in Germany. Recently a third opiate was added to the list, one which in itself alone would have sufficed to complete the ruin of all subtle and daring intellectual animation, I speak of music, our costive and constipating German music. How much peevish ponderousness, paralysis, dampness, dressing-gown languor, and beer is there not in German intelligence! The section is divided into six parts:. Nietzsche is not a hedonist , arguing that any passions in excess can "drag their victim down with the weight of their folly. In an analogy, Nietzsche claims that the Christian approach to morality is not much different than how an unskilled dentist might treat any tooth pain by removing the tooth entirely rather than pursue other less aggressive and equally effective treatments. Christianity doesn't attempt to "spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire," which leads Nietzsche to conclude that the Christian Church is "hostile to life. Nietzsche develops his idea of spiritualizing the passions through examining the concepts of love and enmity. Love, he claims, is actually the "spiritualization of sensuality. Even with the anti- Christian sentiment that pervades his thinking, Nietzsche makes it very clear that he has no interest in eliminating the Christian Church. Instead, he recognizes that his own philosophical program would be neither as effective or necessary without it. If his enemy the Church denies the "instincts of life," this helps him to develop a position that affirms them. Using theological language, Nietzsche insists that the real " blasphemy " is the Christian "rebellion against life. Nietzsche concludes that insisting people ought to be one way and not another leads to a form of bigotry that devalues the goodness of human diversity, the "enchanting wealth of types. Ultimately, Nietzsche concludes that it is "immoralists" such as himself who have the highest respect for inherent worth of individuals because they do not value one person's approach to life over any others. In the chapter The Four Great Errors , he suggests that people, especially Christians, confuse the effect for the cause, and that they project the human ego and subjectivity on to other things, thereby creating the illusionary concept of being , and therefore also of the thing-in-itself and God. In reality, motive or intention is "an accompaniment to an act" [9] rather than the cause of that act. By removing causal agency based on free, conscious will, Nietzsche critiques the ethics of accountability, suggesting that everything is necessary in a whole that can neither be judged nor condemned, because there is nothing outside of it. Men were thought of as free so that they could become guilty : consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness Today, when we have started to move in the reverse direction, when we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with 'punishment' and 'guilt' by means of the concept of the 'moral world-order'. Christianity is a hangman's metaphysics. The Four Great Errors. In this passage, Nietzsche proclaims his lack of belief of an objective morality, stating that there is no such thing as moral fact. With this information, he lists two examples of cases where moralization of mankind was attempted, despite the lack of complete moral truth. The people pushing for this morality are called 'improvers' by Nietzsche, the quotes representing the fact that these certain people fail at their goal of improving man. The first of these examples is that of religion. In this example, Nietzsche tells a fictional story of a priest who converts a man to Christianity , in order to keep him moral. However, his man eventually falls into basic human instinct such as lust, and is thus labeled as a sinner. Afterwards, the man is full of hatred, and is ostracized by others. The priest in this story represents the 'improver,' as he attempts to moralize someone, but only makes the man's life miserable. The second of these examples is that of the caste system in India. This system made an attempt of moralizing man by method of demoting and dehumanizing the Dalit who were at the very bottom of society. The 'improvers' in this scenario are those who perpetuate the caste system, and contribute to the dehumanization of the Dalit for the goal of moralization. In examining German society of his day, Nietzsche attributes any advantage Germans hold over other European countries to basic ethical virtues and not to any cultural sophistication. Nietzsche attributes the decline he sees in the sophistication in German thought to prioritizing politics over the intellect. https://files8.webydo.com/9589544/UploadedFiles/E9047456-F9BD-1D2A-A332-1E8C0399A8ED.pdf https://uploads.strikinglycdn.com/files/91d12544-caaf-4d03-a711-eb75ad2c729f/organverantwortung-und-gesellschafterklagen-in-der- aktiengesellschaft-296-sitzung-am-16-oktober-91.pdf https://static.s123-cdn-static.com/uploads/4644153/normal_6020b1f539f40.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9591233/UploadedFiles/7FFAC878-B9A1-7E27-96E5-A8D9CCEC9279.pdf https://static.s123-cdn-static.com/uploads/4645634/normal_60202b8a8ad8b.pdf https://static.s123-cdn-static.com/uploads/4645495/normal_6020c70bbcd4f.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9586088/UploadedFiles/37DF67D3-9D97-9E3E-BA1A-A8CF7164FACE.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9586309/UploadedFiles/395D8D31-E925-5678-F854-1A30DE92C081.pdf