Nietzsche criticizes German culture of the day as unsophisticated,
decadent and
nihilistic, and shoots some disapproving arrows at key French, English, and Italian cultural figures who represent similar tendencies. In contrast to all these alleged representatives of cultural decadence, Nietzsche applauds
Caesar,
Napoleon,
Goethe,
Thucydides and the
Sophists as healthier and stronger types. The book states the
transvaluation of all values as Nietzsche's final and most important project, and gives a view of antiquity wherein
the Romans for once take precedence over the
ancient Greeks, albeit only in the field of literature. The book is divided into twelve sections:
Foreword In the foreword, Nietzsche says that the book is an escape into the idle hours of a psychologist. He then calls his book a "Great Declaration of War", saying he intends to sound out famous idols with a hammer. He inscribes it with the date 30 September, 1888.
Maxims and Arrows This section comprises 44 short
maxims that introduce the main themes of the work.
Maxim number eight Out of life’s school of war—What does not kill me makes me stronger.(German
Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker) Nietzsche elaborates on this theme in
Ecce Homo, published shortly after
Twilight of the Idols, stating that "...to an intrinsically sound nature, illness may even constitute a powerful stimulus to life, to a surplus of life. ... He divines remedies for injuries; he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage; that which does not kill him makes him stronger." As an illustration of this principle in practice, Nietzsche explains that his own overcoming of pessimism occurred during a period of dramatic downturn in his health, writing that "it was during those years in which my vitality reached its lowest point that I ceased from being a pessimist: the instinct of self-recovery forbade my holding to a philosophy of poverty and desperation."
Maxim number 12 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. In
Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche makes twenty-two sarcastic or sardonic quips about the English, forty-one about women, over one hundred about the Germans.
Maxim number 31 When stepped on, a worm doubles up. That is clever. In that way he lessens the probability of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility. Nietzsche elaborates on his opinion of humility in
On the Genealogy of Morality. He considers virtues such as humility, patience, and compassion as qualities useful to the weak. Therefore, the weak praise qualities that ease their suffering. Aphorism 31 echoes the idea of humility serving the purpose of reducing the chances of suffering.
The Problem of Socrates Throughout history, Nietzsche asserts, the most learned seem to have shared a common belief that life is worthless. Nietzsche argues that this idea was not a symptom of a healthy society but of one in decline. Philosophers such as
Socrates or
Plato, Nietzsche explains, shared a common physiological disposition to feel negatively about life, which reflected the decay of the superior Greek culture that preceded them. Nietzsche holds Socrates in special contempt. Socrates, he believes, was ugly (a symptom or feature of his inner weakness and decadence) and was a product of the "lower orders" of society. Nietzsche singles out two particular ideas of Socrates for attack. The first is the interconnectedness of reason, virtue, and happiness. The second is Socrates's introduction of the
dialectic method to philosophy (the process by which two or more people with different points of view reach a conclusion through a process of discourse, logic, and reason, also called the
Socratic method). Nietzsche thought that the dialectic allowed weaker philosophical positions and less sophisticated thinkers to gain too large a foothold in a society. Nietzsche's program valued instinct over reason, but because of Socrates and the dialectic, Greek culture now became "absurdly rational." A key part of Nietzsche's thesis is that "happiness and instinct are one," but reason stands in direct opposition to instinct. Ultimately, Nietzsche insisted, the value of life cannot be estimated, and any judgment concerning it only reveals the person's life-denying or
life-affirming tendencies.
Reason in Philosophy Nietzsche denies many of Plato's ideas, specifically that of Being and Becoming, the world of the forms, and the fallibility of the senses. More precisely, he does not believe that one should refute the senses, as Plato did. This goes against Nietzsche's ideals of human excellence in that it is a symptom of personal decadence. By decadence, Nietzsche is referring to a fading of life, and vitality and an embrace of weakness. In Nietzsche's view, if one is to accept a non-sensory, unchanging world as superior and our sensory world as inferior, then one is adopting a hatred of nature and thus a hatred of the sensory world – the world of the living. Nietzsche postulates that only one who is weak, sickly or
ignoble would subscribe to such a belief. Nietzsche goes on to relate this obsession with the non-physical realm to
Christianity and the concept of
Heaven. Nietzsche indicates that the belief in the Christian God is similar to the decadence and hatred of 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." Enmity, on the other hand, spiritualizes the state of having enemies since having opponents helps us to define and strengthen our own positions. 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." Christian morality is ultimately symptomatic of a "declining, debilitated, weary, condemned 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." Also, the belief that people can truly change their nature disregards the fact that any person is a "piece of fate." It is not possible for a person to divorce himself from either the past events or present circumstances that cause them to be who they are. 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.
The Four Great Errors 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" 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. What people typically deem "
vice" is in fact merely "the inability
not to react to a stimulus." In this light, the concept of
morality becomes purely a means of control: "the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of
finding guilty."
The 'Improvers' of Mankind 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 sanctioned by
Manusmriti in India. This system made an attempt of moralizing man by making regulations on even breeding of no more than 4 races, and thus
dehumanizing the
Tschandala who were outcasts. The 'improvers' in this scenario is
Manusmriti, and it contributes to the moral-prejudices against people in order to enforce
Aryan values.
What the Germans Lack 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. 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." Educators, he argues, are vital to teach three key skills: seeing (the ability to think before acting on impulse), thinking ("Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned."), and speaking and writing ("One has to be able to dance with the
pen."). 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. "All higher education belongs to the exceptions alone: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. Great and fine things can never be common property."
Skirmishes of an Untimely Man 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.
What I Owe to the Ancients Nietzsche criticizes Plato, accusing him of "over-morality" and calling him an "exalted swindle." He goes further to claim that "Christianity is Platonism for the people" in its harmful morality. 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."
The Hammer Speaks Nietzsche speaks of Part III 'Of Old and New Law Tablets' in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. ==Notes==