Twilight of the Idols (1889)
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Or, How One
Philosophizes with a
Hammer
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Historical Context & Style
Main Attacks:
Socrates, Philosophy,
Reason, Morality, “The
True World,” Religion,
Education, The German
State…
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Nietzsche’s Attack on Philosophy
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What is “The Problem of Socrates”?
Decadent, i.e., anti-life, ugly, declining, criminal,
pseudo-Greek, anti-Greek
“The Socratic equation of reason, virtue, and
happiness is opposed to all instincts of the
earlier Greeks.” (p. 475)
Dialectics replaces noble customs
Reason becomes a tyrant and rationality the
savior
The moralism of Greek philosophers is
pathologically conditioned
 The whole improvement-morality was a
misunderstanding in opposition to the
instincts (pp. 478-79)
 When life is ascending, happiness equals
instinct
 Philosophy is a preparation for death
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The Next Attack: “Reason” in Ф
Philosophers lack historical sense and hate
becoming
 E.g., the Eleatics, such as Parmenides
(515 BC) and Zeno (490 BC)
 They maintained a doctrine that reality
consisted of indivisible, unchanging being;
all is one; thus they denied motion, time,
and change
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Heraclitus (d. 480 BC) is excepted
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He taught becoming
rather than being and is
famous for saying “You
cannot step in the same
river twice.”
This world, the only real
world we have any sense
of, is a world of
becoming.
To say there is a “true
world” of being is an
illusion.
Any distinction between a “true” and
“apparent” world is a sign of decadence,
the decline of life.
 The Dionysian approach: affirm this life
and this world and abolish any slanderous
talk of the “true world.” (p. 484)
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Morality as Anti-Nature
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§1: Moralities have sought to destroy the
passions.
Any attack on the passions is an attack on life.
Such is the hostile practice of the church, which
has never thought to ask “How can one
spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?”
§2: Moralists who seek to exterminate the
passions are too weak to control them.
§3: Towards a spiritualization of sensuality (love)
and hostility (love of enemies).
A renunciation of “peace of soul”? (pp. 488-489)
§4: “Every naturalism in morality—that is, every
healthy morality—is dominated by an instinct of
life.”
 §6: How naïve and stupid to suggest that one
ought to be a certain way. “Reality shows us an
enchanting wealth of types.”
 We immoralists approve and affirm. (p. 491)
 §5: All value judgments reflect a certain kind of
life. What kind of life do your values reflect?
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The Four Great Errors
1. The error of confusing cause and effect.
 =religion, morality
 Revaluation of Values examples:
 (a) meagre diet and a long life (Cornaro)
 (b) Virtue and happiness
 (c) Vice and degeneration
 (d) illness and weakness
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2. The error of a false causality.
False picture: inner states-motives-will
These are merely surface phenomena of
consciousness; we know nothing about true
mental causes.
4. The error of free will.
A psychological explanation: an excuse for
making one dependent on the theologian in
order to be judged guilty and punished.
”Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.”
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What can our teaching be?
– No one is responsible for humanity.
– There is no end or purpose for humanity.
– “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.”
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Amor fati (love of fate)
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The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
What the Germans Lack
Or, “On Spirit”
 What has led to cultural decline?
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– Politics
– Christianity
– Beer (Oh, no!) (p. 507)
– Education: What does Nietzsche have to say
about higher education? Is this relevant to
you?
On Higher Education
The goal of education (Bildung) is
cultivation, the formation of a human
being into a mature, refined, and cultural
whole.
 Educators needed, not scholars or
secondary school teachers
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Towards an Affirmative Perspective
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The Three Tasks for Educators
– Learn to see
 Be open, suspend judgment
 First step towards spirituality
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Learn to think
– The craft of logic
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Learn to speak and write
– Too enigmatic
– See Zarathustra, pp. 152-153
Skirmishes of an Untimely Man
Which did you find
the most significant?
 On Art and Artists
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Towards a psychology
of the artist (sec. 810)
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L’art pour l’art (sec.
24)
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Goethe (sec. 49-51)
What I Owe the Ancients
To the Romans: Style
 To the Greeks: Dionysus (This is the
central metaphor for Nietzsche’s
affirmative philosophy.)
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The Birth of Tragedy Out of the
Spirit of Music (1872)
Apollo: god of light and dreams
 Apollonian: well-ordered, rational and
serene
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Dionysus: god fertility and wine
 Dionysian: wild, frenzied and sensuous
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Through art life is affirmed as livable.
“Art is the truly metaphysical activity of man” and
“the existence of the world is justified only as an
aesthetic phenomenon.”
“The continuous development of art is bound up
with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality—just
as procreation depends on the duality of the
sexes, involving perpetual strife with only
periodically intervening reconciliations.”
On Dionysus (pp. 560-563)