The Twilight of the Idols

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781537808673
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Twilight of the Idols was written in just over a week, between 26 August and 3 September 1888, while Nietzsche was on holiday in Sils Maria. As Nietzsche's fame and popularity was spreading both inside and outside Germany, he felt that he needed a text that would serve as a short introduction to his work. Originally titled A Psychologist's Idleness, it was renamed Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

THE ANTICHRIST

An Attempted Criticism of Christianity

PREFACE

This book belongs to the very few. Maybe not one of them is yet alive; unless he be of those who understand my Zarathustra. How can I confound myself with those who to-day already find a hearing?—Only the day after to-morrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.

I am only too well aware of the conditions under which a man understands me, and then necessarily understands. He must be intellectually upright to the point of hardness, in order even to endure my seriousness and my passion. He must be used to living on mountain-tops,—and to feeling the wretched gabble of politics and national egotism beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never inquire whether truth is profitable or whether it may prove fatal.... Possessing from strength a predilection for questions for which no one has enough courage nowadays; the courage for the forbidden; his predestination must be the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for the most remote things. A new conscience for truths which hitherto have remained dumb. And the will to economy on a large scale: to husband his strength and his enthusiasm.... He must honour himself, he must love himself; he must be absolutely free with regardto himself.... Very well then! Such men alone are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained readers: of what account are the rest?—the rest are simply—humanity.—One must be superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

1

Let us look each other in the face. We are hyperboreans,—we know well enough how far outside the crowd we stand. “Thou wilt find the way to the Hyperboreans neither by land nor by water”: Pindar already knew this much about us. Beyond the north, the ice, and death—our life, our happiness.... We discovered happiness; we know the way; we found the way out of thousands of years of labyrinth. Who else would have found it?—Not the modern man, surely?—"I do not know where I am or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not where it is or what to do,"—sighs the modern man. We were made quite ill by this modernity,—with its indolent peace, its cowardly compromise, and the whole of the virtuous filth of its Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur de cœurwhich “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything, is a Sirocco for us. We prefer to live amid ice than to be breathed upon by modern virtues and other southerly winds!... We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others: but we were very far from knowing whither to direct our bravery. We were becoming gloomy; people called us fatalists. Our fate—it was the abundance, the tension and the storing up of power. We thirsted for thunderbolts and great deeds; we kept at the most respectful distance from the joy of the weakling, from “resignation.” ... Thunder was in our air, that part of nature which we are, became overcast—for we had no direction. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.

2

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power isincreasing,—that resistance has been overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, free from all moralic acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our humanity. And they ought even to be helped to perish.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy with all the botched and the weak—Christianity.

3

The problem I set in this work is not what will replace mankind in the order of living being! (—Man is an end—); but, what type of man must be reared, must be willed, as having the higher value, as being the most worthy of life and the surest guarantee of the future.

This more valuable type has appeared often enough already: but as a happy accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has rather been precisely the most feared; hitherto he has been almost the terrible in itself;—and from out the very fear he provoked there arose the will to rear the type which has how been reared, attained: the domestic animal, the gregarious animal, the sick animal man,—the Christian.

4

Mankind does not represent a development towards a better, stronger or higher type, in the sense in which this is supposed to occur to-day. “Progress” is merely a modern idea—that is to say, a false idea. The modern European is still far below the European of the Renaissance in value. The process of evolution does not by any means imply elevation, enhancement and increasing strength.

On the other hand isolated and individual cases are continually succeeding in different places on earth, as the outcome of the most different cultures, and in these a higher type certainly manifests itself: something which by the side of mankind in general, represents a kind of superman. Such lucky strokes of great success have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. And even whole races, tribes and nations may in certain circumstances represent such lucky strokes.

5

We must not deck out and adorn Christianity: it has waged a deadly war upon this higher type of man, it has set a ban upon all the fundamental instincts of this type, and has distilled evil and the devil himself out of these instincts:—the strong man as the typical pariah, the villain. Christianity has sided with everything weak, low, and botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism towards all the self-preservative instincts of strong life: it has corrupted even the reason of the strongest intellects, by teaching that the highest values of intellectuality are sinful, misleading and full of temptations. The most lamentable example of this was the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the perversion of his reason through original sin, whereas it had only been perverted by his Christianity.

6

A painful and ghastly spectacle has just risen before my eyes. I tore down the curtain which concealed mankind’s corruption. This word in my mouth is at least secure from the suspicion that it contains a moral charge against mankind. It is—I would fain emphasise this again—free from moralic acid: to such an extent is this so, that I am most thoroughly conscious of the corruption in question precisely in those quarters in which hitherto people have aspired with most determination to “virtue” and to “godliness.” As you have already surmised, I understand corruption in the sense of decadence. What I maintain is this, that all the values upon which mankind builds its highest hopes and desires are decadent values.

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it selects and prefers that which is detrimental to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” of “human ideals"—and it is not impossible that I shall have to write it—would almost explain why man is so corrupt. Life itself, to my mind, is nothing more nor less than the instinct of growth, of permanence, of accumulating forces, of power: where the will to power is lacking, degeneration sets in. My contention is that all the highest values of mankind lack this will,—that the values of decline and ofnihilism are exercising the sovereign power under the cover of the holiest names.

7

Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity is opposed to the tonic passions which enhance the energy of the feeling of life: its action is depressing. A man loses power when he pities. By means of pity the drain on strength which suffering itself already introduces into the world is multiplied a thousandfold. Through pity, suffering itself becomes infectious; in certain circumstances it may lead to a total loss of life and vital energy, which is absurdly put of proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first standpoint; but there is a still more important one. Supposing one measures pity according to the value of the reactions it usually stimulates, its danger to life appears in a much more telling light On the whole, pity thwarts the law of development which is the law of selection. It preserves that which is ripe for death, it fights in favour of the disinherited and the condemned of life; thanks to the multitude of abortions of all kinds which it maintains in life, it lends life itself a sombre and questionable aspect. People have dared to call pity a virtue (—in every noble culture it is considered as a weakness—); people went still further, they exalted it to the virtue, the root and origin of all virtues,—but, of course, what must never be forgotten is the fact that this was done from the standpoint of a philosophy which was nihilistic, and on whose shield the device The Denial of Life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this respect: by means of pity, life is denied and made more worthy of denial,—pity is thepraxis of Nihilism. I repeat, this depressing and infectious instinct thwarts those instincts which aim at the preservation and enhancement of the value life: by multiplying misery quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable, it is the principal agent in promoting decadence,—pity exhorts people to nothing, to nonentity! But they do not say “nonentity“ they say “Beyond,” or “God,” or “the true life”; or Nirvana, or Salvation, or Blessedness, instead. This innocent rhetoric, which belongs to the realm of the religio-moral idiosyncrasy, immediately appears to be very much less innocentif one realises what the tendency is which here tries to drape itself in the mantle of sublime expressions—the tendency of hostility to life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why he elevated pity to a virtue.... Aristotle, as you know, recognised in pity a morbid and dangerous state, of which it was wise to rid one’s self from time to time by a purgative: he regarded tragedy as a purgative. For the sake of the instinct of life, it would certainly seem necessary to find some means of lancing any such morbid and dangerous accumulation of pity, as that which possessed Schopenhauer (and unfortunately the whole of our literary and artistic decadence as well, from St Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), if only to make it burst.... Nothing is more unhealthy in the midst of our unhealthy modernity, than Christian pity. To be doctors here, to be inexorable here, to wield the knife effectively here,— all this is our business, all this is our kind of love to our fellows, this is what makes us philosophers, us hyperboreans!—

8

It is necessary to state whom we regard as our antithesis:—the theologians, and all those who have the blood of theologians in their veins—the whole of our philosophy.... A man must have had his very nose upon this fatality, or better still he must have experienced it in his own soul; he must almost have perished through it, in order to be unable to treat this matter lightly (—the free-spiritedness of our friends the naturalists and physiologists is, in my opinion, a joke,—what they lack in these questions is passion, what they lack is having suffered from these questions—). This poisoning extends much further than people think: I unearthed the “arrogant” instinct of the theologian, wherever nowadays people feel themselves idealists,—wherever, thanks to superior antecedents, they claim the right to rise above reality and to regard it with suspicion.... Like the priest the idealist has every grandiloquent concept in his hand (—and not only in his hand!), he wields them all with kindly contempt against the “understanding,” the “senses,” “honours,” “decent living,” “science”; he regards such things as beneath him, as detrimental and seductive forces, upon the face of which, “the Spirit” moves in pure absoluteness:—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word holiness, had not done incalculably more harm to life hitherto, than any sort of horror and vice.... Pure spirit is pure falsehood.... As long as the priest, the professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is considered as the highest kind of man, there can be no answer to the question, what is truth? Truth has already been turned topsy-turvy, when the conscious advocate of nonentity and of denial passes as the representative of “truth.”

9

It is upon this theological instinct that I wage war. I find traces of it everywhere. Whoever has the blood of theologians in his veins, stands from the start in a false and dishonest position to all things. The pathos which grows out of this state, is called Faith: that is to say, to shut one’s eyes once and for all, in order not to suffer at the sight of incurable falsity. People convert this faulty view of all things into a moral, a virtue, a thing of holiness. They endow their distorted vision with a good conscience,—they claim that no other point of view is any longer of value, once theirs has been made sacrosanct with the names “God,” “Salvation,” “Eternity.” I unearthed the instinct of the theologian everywhere: it is the most universal, and actually the most subterranean form of falsity on earth. That which a theologian considers true, ...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• MAXIMS AND MISSILES
• THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES
• “REASON” IN PHILOSOPHY
• MORALITY AS THE ENEMY OF NATURE
• THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
• THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
• THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
• SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
• THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
• THE HAMMER SPEAKETH
• THE ANTICHRIST
• THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE