Twilight of the Idols (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Friedrich Nietzsche and Dennis Sweet

Never one to back away from controversy, Friedrich Nietzsche assails the Christian Church in Twilight of the Idols.  In this classic work, he sets out to substitute the morality of the Catholic and the Protestant Churches with that of Dionysian morality.  Twilight of the Idols furthermore lays the foundation for key arguments that Nietzsche more fully develops in later writings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428959

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was an acclaimed German philosopher who rose to prominence during the late nineteenth century. His work provides a thorough examination of societal norms often rooted in religion and politics. As a cultural critic, Nietzsche is affiliated with nihilism and individualism with a primary focus on personal development. His most notable books include The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. and Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche is frequently credited with contemporary teachings of psychology and sociology.

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INTRODUCTION

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE’S TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS IS PERHAPS THE brightest star in the constellation of masterpieces written in 1888, the last year of his extremely productive career. It is his final verdict on many important issues. In Ecce Homo, he calls it an exception among books: there is none richer in substance, more independent, more subversive—more evil (IV, ii, § 1). Like many of Nietzsche’s earlier works, it touches upon numerous topics; but it does so with a grace and style and purpose that is unique. It is a feast of original insights on human nature, on the origins and original errors of morality and philosophy, on education, on the contemporary German character, on Germany’s growing sense of nationalism and its dangers, and on Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian attitude. In its style, its brevity, and its organization, Twilight of the Idols is a tour de force of a master writer and thinker.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Saxony, on October 15, 1844. He was the first of three children born to Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor, and his wife, Franziska Oehler. In the summer of 1849, Nietzsche’s father succumbed to softening of the brain (Gehirnerweichung) and died. After the death of Nietzsche’s infant brother the following winter, his mother took him and his sister, Elisabeth, to live in Naumburg. In 1858, Nietzsche was awarded a scholarship to Pfortaschule, the most prestigious boarding school in Germany. For the next six years he flourished under its strict educational regimen. He graduated in 1864, and spent two semesters at the University of Bonn as a dissatisfied theology student. The following year he matriculated at the University of Leipzig and began pursuing what he then regarded as his true calling, classical philology. At this time he also discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a philosopher who would have a profound effect upon his views.

In 1869 Nietzsche’s fortune changed dramatically. Although he had yet to finish his dissertation, he was offered the post of Professor Extraordinarius in Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. This windfall was due largely to the influence of Friedrich Ritschl (1806-76): Nietzsche’s teacher and mentor at Leipzig, and one of the most respected philologists of his day. In his letter of recommendation, Ritschl praised his young student’s abilities in philology and history, and concluded by stating that, whatever [Nietzsche] wants to do he will be able to do. Soon after assuming his professorial duties in Switzerland, Nietzsche became an intimate friend of the composer Richard Wagner (1813-83) and his significant other, Cosima von Bülow (1837-1930), daughter of Franz Liszt, who were living in a villa near Basel. For the next few years Wagner would serve as Nietzsche’s confidant, sounding board, object of adoration, and ersatz father.

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, appeared in 1872. The book’s characterization of the creative impetus behind Greek drama in terms of a synthesis of the instinctive Dionysian and the rational Apollinian impulses, and its description of the Socratic attitude of reason over instinct as one of decadence, represent seminal moments for the subsequent developments of Nietzsche’s thought. However, the book’s unabashed praise of Wagner’s music of the future seemed to offset much of its merit in the eyes of the academic community. From 1873 to 1876, Nietzsche published four essays that comprise his Untimely Meditations. These were followed by Human, All Too Human (1878), its two addenda (Assorted Opinions and Maxims [1879] and The Wanderer and His Shadow [1880]), Daybreak (1881), and The Gay Science (1882). These works, from 1878 to 1882, were expressions of what he called his free-thinking period. Despite the fact that Nietzsche was suffering from extreme health problems and depression, these books express an exceedingly positive attitude toward human existence. His criticisms of past and present psychological and sociological diseases are presented with devastating clarity and rapier style through Nietzsche’s masterful use of aphorisms.

In 1876, owing to the persistent bad health that plagued him his entire life, e.g., migraine headaches, painful eye pressure and diminished sight, and prolonged bouts of vomiting, Nietzsche was relieved of his teaching duties at Basel and was provided a modest pension, which allowed him to travel throughout Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and southern France in an attempt to find a climate both amenable to his precarious health and conducive to his productivity. His literary experimentalism and philosophical power reaches a crescendo in his next book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), which he regarded as the greatest present that has ever been made to [humanity] so far (Ecce Homo, preface, 4). This was followed, in 1886, by Beyond Good and Evil, a more organized exposition of his thought. A year later he published the three essays titled On the Genealogy of Morals and produced a new edition of The Gay Science, to which he added a preface, some poems, and a fifth book.

In the amazingly productive year 1888, Nietzsche completed five books: The Wagner Case, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche contra Wagner. The first and the last of these were described as companion pieces. They were intended to make clear the antithetical views of Wagner and Nietzsche, and to illustrate the dramatic contrast between their radically different conceptions of art and life. The Antichrist was written as the first of a four-part work to be titled The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht), which involved nothing less than the revaluation (Umwertung) of all values. The Antichrist is a dissection of the motives of what he regarded as the most dangerous and unscrupulous value system that infects Western civilization—the Christian Church and its perverse values and ideals. Ecce Homo (literally, behold the man—Nietzsche’s ironic adaptation of the words spoken by Pilate when Jesus was brought before him) is a fascinating, utterly self-serving self-examination of Nietzsche’s own writings and personality. Although much of the book is an exercise in uninhibited self-aggrandizement, it does offer some interesting insights into his motives and his self-imposed tasks as an author. A good deal of this material from 1888 is polemical in the extreme and provides the critical foundation for his proposed revaluation of all values: Nietzsche’s avowed destiny to expose the unnatural, mendacious, and injurious character and motives of Christianity; and to provide a more natural, more responsible, and healthier approach to human existence. This program was, however, cut short by his mental collapse in January 1889, brought on by the tertiary stage of syphilis. He spent the last eleven years of his life in institutions or under the care of his sister, Elisabeth. Nietzsche died of a heart attack on August 25, 1900.

With the exception of the strange and whimsical The Wagner Case, which was published in September 1888, Twilight of the Idols is the only book composed during Nietzsche’s flurry of creativity that year which he actually published; that is to say, that he wrote and edited to completion. He began work on it at the end of June and finished in September. He had originally intended the book to be titled Idle Leisure of a Psychologist (Müssiggang eines Psychologen). The leisure, he explains in a letter, dated September 14, 1888, to his old friend, Paul Deussen, is a moment of relaxation,

. . . from an immeasurably difficult and decisive task which, once understood, will split the history of mankind into two halves. Its meaning in four words: revaluation of all values. Much that has been the subject to debate will no longer be an open question. . . . Being Christian, to name just one result, will from then on be indecent. . . . (Fuss and Shapiro, p. 124)

Clearly, the strain of the tremendous task Nietzsche had set for himself, the revaluation of all values, weighed heavily on his mind throughout 1888. Just as his health fluctuated between the agonies of migraines and bouts of vomiting to the ecstasies of overwhelming pleasure and self-assurance, so too his writings ranged from the rollicking farce against Wagner (i.e., Nietzsche contra Wagner) to his bringing about "a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far" (Ecce Homo, IV, 1)—the revaluation of all values, or the four-part treatise, The Will to Power.

In September 1888, Nietzsche described his idle leisure book to his friend and disciple Peter Gast. Nietzsche soon received a reply that indicated that Gast was aghast at the humility of the intended title of the book. At the end of September he wrote to Nietzsche:

The tread of a giant, enough to make the mountains tremble in their depths, is no longer an idle stroll. . . . Oh, I beg you, if an incapable man may beg: a more resplendent, lustrous title! (Quoted in Cate, p. 523)

Never a champion for humility or understatement, Nietzsche agreed, and devised the clever, multi-semantical title, Twilight of the Idols, with the subtitle, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. At one level, the German title, Die Götzen-Dämmerung, was clearly a play upon the title of the fourth and final part of Richard Wagner’s monumental Ring Cycle, the musical drama, Götterdämmerung, Twilight of the Gods. In Wagner’s majestic work, the naïve hero, Siegfried, overcomes his adversary, the monster Fafner, with the refashioned sword of his grandfather, Wotan. The drama concludes with the death of Siegfried, the immolation of the heroine, Brünhilde, the destruction of Valhalla and the old Germanic pantheon, and the dawn of a new religious worldview based on love and self-sacrifice, i.e., Christianity. Nietzsche, with his title, was clearly playing with the similarities and distinct contrasts between his book and Wagner’s drama.

For Wagner, the twilight of the gods refers to the replacement of the Germanic pagan gods with the new and improved theology of Christianity. For Nietzsche, twilight of the idols means the demise of the false gods that modern civilization has fashioned and objecti fied. The book’s subtitle, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, has special meaning as well. In Wagner’s musical drama, Siegfried tests the reforged sword of Wotan by destroying the anvil which he used in recreating it, and by using it to destroy Fafner. Nietzsche’s weapon of choice is a hammer. At the end of the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Das Rheingold, the god Thor uses his hammer to clear things up, i.e., to dispel the mist, despondency, and confusion that oppressed the gods and to clear the way to Valhalla, the gods’ new and improved home. Similarly, in Twilight of the Idols, when Nietzsche philosophizes with a hammer, his intention is to clear things up, i.e., to dispel the mistakes, mendacity, and delusions that humanity has created and endured in philosophy, religion, and morality, and to create a less ethereal rainbow bridge to a new, more honest, and more productive future. Unlike Wagner’s Siegfried, who uses his sword, Nothung, to destroy what it strikes through the external power of its wielder, Nietzsche’s philosophical hammer is described as a tuning fork. He merely taps the idols to determine whether they are solid and valuable, or hollow and worthless. Of course, in each case the latter conclusion is drawn. This approach is intended to show that these views, these idols, are inherently false, hollow, and unsubstantial. They shatter and fall of their own weight (or lack thereof) through a simple examination of their origins and essential claims. Unlike The Antichrist, where Nietzsche comes out with guns blazing against Christian morality, in the present book he seems content to simply diagnose the diseases that have infected Western civilization for over two thousand years, and allow these fatuous fictions to die of natural, internal causes. Yet he describes the book as a great declaration of war: a war not against the beliefs of a particular age or culture, but rather against the so-called 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. (Twilight,