Twilight of the Idols

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780486841632
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

" Twilight of the Idols means that the old truth is on its last legs, " declared Friedrich Nietzsche in this 1889polemic. Forceful in his language and profound in his message, the philosopher delivered the nineteenth century's most devastating attack on Christianity. Intended by Nietzsche as a general introduction to his philosophy, it assails the "idols" of Western philosophy and culture, including the concepts of Socratic rationality and Christian morality.
Written while Nietzsche was at the peak of his powers, less than a year before the onset of the insanity that gripped him until his death in 1900, this work's proximity to the end of the author's career renders it a distinctive portrait from his later period. The source of the famous dictum, "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger, " it blazes with provocative, inflammatory rhetoric that challenges readers to reexamine what they worship and why.

ROVING EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER

1

My impracticables.—Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.

Rousseau, or return to nature in impuris naturalibus.

Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.—Dante, or the hyena poetising in tombs.—Kant, or cant as an intelligible character.—Victor Hugo, or Pharos in the sea of absurdity.—Liszt, or the school of running—after women.—George Sand, or lactea ubertas; i.e. the milkcow with “the fine style.”—Michelet, or enthusiasm which strips off the coat . . . Carlyle, or pessimism as an undigested dinner.—John Stuart Mill, or offensive transparency.—Les frères de Goncourt, or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer. Music by Offenbach.—Zola, or “the delight to stink.”

2

Renan. —Divinity, or the perversion of reason by “original sin” (Christianity): witness Renan, who, whenever he ventures a more general affirmation or negation, fails to catch the point with painful regularity. For example, he would like to unite into one la science and la noblesse; la science, however, belongs to democracy—that is perfectly obvious. He desires, with no little ambition, to represent an intellectual aristocratism; but at the same time he lies on his knees (and not on his knees only) before the anti-thetical doctrine, the évangile des humbles . . . What is the good of all freethinking, modernism, gibing, and wrynecked dexterity, if you continue to be a Christian, a Roman Catholic, and even a priest, in your intestines! Renan’s ingenuity lies in his seductiveness, just as in the case of the Jesuit and the confessor; the broad priestly smirk is not lacking in his intellectuality,—like all priests he only becomes dangerous when he loves. Nobody equals him in his faculty for idolising in a fatally dangerous manner . . . This spirit of Renan, a spirit which enervates, is an additional calamity for poor, sick, feeble-willed France.

3

Sainte-Beuve.—Nothing of a man; fully of petty resentment against all masculine intellects. Wanders about delicate, curious, tired, “pumping” people,—a female after all, with a woman’s revengefulness and a woman’s sensuousness. As a psychologist a genius for médisance; inexhaustibly rich in expedients for the purpose; nobody understands better how to mix poison with praise. Plebeian in his lowest instincts and allied with the ressentiment of Rousseau: consequently a Romanticist—for Rousseau’s instinct grunts and yearns for revenge under all romantisme. A revolutionist, though held tolerably in check by fear. Ill at ease in presence of everything possessing strength (public opinion, the Academy, the Court, and even Port Royal). Embittered against all greatness in men and things, against all that believes in itself. Poet enough and half-woman enough to be sensible of greatness as a power; continually turning like the celebrated worm, because he continually feels himself trodden upon. As a critic, without a standard, without firmness, and without backbone, with the tongue of the cosmopolitan libertin in favour of variety, but even without sufficient courage to confess the libertinage. As an historian, without a philosophy, without the power of philosophic vision,—on that account declining the task of passing judgment in all great questions, holding up “objectivity” as a mask. He behaves otherwise, however, with regard to all matters where a delicate, worn-out taste is the highest tribunal; there he really has the courage of himself, pleasure in himself—there he is a master.—In some respects a prototype of Baudelaire.—

4

The Imitatio Christi is one of the books which I cannot hold in my hand without a physiological resistance: it exhales a parfum of the eternally feminine, for which one has to be French—or Wagnerian . . . This saint has such a way of speaking about love that even the Parisiennes become curious.—I am told that A. Comte, that shrewdest of Jesuits, who wanted to lead his fellow countrymen to Rome by the indirect route of science, inspired himself by this book. I believe it: the “religion of the heart” . . .

5

G. Eliot.—They have got rid of Christian God, and now think themselves obliged to cling firmer than ever to Christian morality: that is English consistency; we shall not lay the blame of it on ethical girls à la Eliot. In England for every little emancipation from divinity, people have to re-acquire respectability by becoming moral fanatics in an aweinspiring manner. That is the penalty they have to pay there.—With us it is different. When we give up Christian belief, we thereby deprive ourselves of the right to maintain a stand on Christian morality. This is not at all obvious of itself; we have again and again to make this point clear, in defiance of English shallow-pates. Christianity is a system, a view of things, consistently thought out and complete. If we break out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, we thereby break the whole into pieces: we have no longer anything determined in our grasp. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for him and what is evil; he believes in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command, its origin is transcendent, it is beyond all criticism, beyond all right of criticism; it has solely truth, if God is truth,—it stands or falls with the belief in God.—If in fact the English imagine they know, of their own accord, “intuitively” what is good and evil, if they consequently imagine they have no more need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that itself is merely the result of the ascendency of Christian valuation, and an expression of its strength and profundity: to such extent that the origin of English morality has been forgotten: to such an extent that the strictly conditional character of its right to existence is no longer perceived. Morality is not as yet a problem for the English . . .

6

George Sand.—I read the first “Letters d’un Voyageur:” like all derived from Rousseau, false, artificial, inflated, exaggerated. I cannot stand this variegated wall paper style; nor the vulgar ambition for generous feelings. But the worst, surely, is the woman’s coquetry with masculine characteristics, with the manners of ill-bred boys.—How cold she must have been withal, this insufferable artist! She wound herself up like a timepiece—and wrote . . . Cold like Hugo, like Balzac, like all Romanticists, as soon as they began to write! And how self-complacently she may then have reposed, this productive writing cow, who, like her master Rousseau himself, had in her something German in the bad sense, and at all events, was only possible owing to the decline of French taste!—But Renan adores her . . .

7

A moral for psychologists.—Never to occupy one’s self with colportage psychology! Never to observe for the sake of observing! That results in false optics, in squinting, in something forced and exaggerated. Experiencing, as a desire to experience—that does not do. In experiencing anything, one must not look towards one’s self; every look then becomes an “evil eye.” A born psychologist is instinctively on his guard against seeing for the sake of seeing; the same is true of the born painter. He never works “according to nature,”—he leaves the sifting and expressing of the “case,” of “nature,” or of the “experienced,” to his instinct, to his camera obscura . . . He only becomes conscious of what is general, the conclusion, the result; he is unacquainted with that arbitrary abstracting from single cases.—What is the result when people do otherwise? for example, when they carry on colportage psychology after the manner of great and small Parisian romanciers? That mode of business lies in wait, as it were, for the actual, it brings home a handful of curiosities every evening . . . But let us only see what finally results from it.—A pile of daubs, at the best a mosaic, in every case, something pieced together, disquieting, loudcoloured. The Goncourts are the worst sinners in this respect; they do not put three sentences together, which are not simply painful to the eye, to the psychologisteye.—Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is accident. Studying “according to nature” seems to me a bad sign; it betrays subjection, weakness, fatalism; this lyinginthedust before petits faits is unworthy of a complete artist. Seeing what is—that belongs to another species of intellects, to the anti-artistic, to the practical. One has to know who one is . . .

8

A psychology of the artist.—To the existence of art, to the existence of any æsthetic activity or perception whatsoever, a preliminary psychological condition is indispensable, namely, ecstasy. Ecstasy must first have intensified the sensitiveness of the whole mechanism; until this takes place art is not realised. All kinds of ecstasy, however differently conditioned, possess this power; above all the ecstasy of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of ecstasy. In like manner the ecstasy which follows in the train of all great desires, of all strong emotions; the ecstasy of the feast, of the contest, of a daring deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the ecstasy of cruelty; the ecstasy in destruction; the ecstasy under certain meteorological influences—for example, spring ecstasy; or under the influence of narcotics; finally, the ecstasy of will, the ecstasy of an overcharged and surging will.—The essential thing in ecstasy is the feeling of increased power and profusion. Out of this feeling we impart to things, we constrain them to accept something from us, we force them by violence;—this proceeding is called idealising. Let us here free ourselves from a prejudice: idealising does not consist, as is commonly believed, in an abstraction or deduction of the insignificant or the contingent. An immense forcing out of principal traits is rather the decisive characteristic, so that the others thereby disappear.

9

In this condition we enrich everything out of our own profusion; what we see, and what we wish for we see enlarged, crowded, strong, and overladen with power. He who, in this condition, transforms things till they mirror his power,—till they are reflections of his perfection. This constraint to transform into the perfect is—art. Everything that he is not, nevertheless becomes for him a delight in himself; in art man enjoys himself as perfection.—It would be allowable to imagine an opposite state of things, a specific anti-artisticalness of instinct—a mode of being which would impoverish everything, attenuate everything, make everything consumptive. In fact, history furnishes us with abundance of such anti-artists, persons with starved lives, who must necessarily lay hold of things, drain them, and make them more emaciated. This is the case with the genuine Christian, Pascal, for example; a Christian, who is at the same time an artist, is not to be found. Let no one be childish enough to refer me to the case of Raphael, or to any homoeopathic Christian of the nineteenth century. Raphael said yea, he did yea; consequently Raphael was no Christian . . .

10

What do the antithetical notions Apollinian and Dionysian (which I have introduced into æsthetics) imply, when we conceive of them both as modes of ecstasy? Apollinian ecstasy above all keeps the eye on the alert so that it acquires the faculty of vision. The painter, the sculptor, and the epic poet, are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian condition, on the other hand, the entire emotional system is excited, and has its energies augmented; so that it discharges itself simultaneously by all channels of expression, and forces the faculties of representation, of imitation, of transfiguration, of metamorphosis—all kinds of mimicry and acting—into activity at one and the same time. The essential thing is the easiness of the metamorphosis, the incapacity to resist a stimulus (similar to the case of certain hysterical patients, who also act every rôle at every hint). It is impossible for Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion, he overlooks no symptom of emotion, he possesses the highest manifestation of knowing and divining instinct, as also the highest development of communicative art. He assumes every external appearance, every emotion; he changes himself continually.—Music, as we understand it at present, is also a collective excitement and collective discharge of the emotions, nevertheless it is only the survival of a much wider world of emotional expression, a mere residuum of Dionysian histrionism. To make music possible as a separate art, several of the senses—especially muscular sense—have here been eliminated (relatively at least, for to a certain extent all rhythm still speaks to our muscles); so that man no longer immediately imitates and gives bodily expression to every feeling. Nevertheless that is the Dionysian normal condition, at any rate the original condition: music is the slowly attained specialisation of this condition at the cost of the faculties nearest akin to it.

11

The actor, the mime, the dancer, the musician, and the lyric poet are fundamentally akin in their instincts and one in their essence, but they have gradually specialised and separated from one another—till indeed they are in contradiction. The lyric poet remained longest united with the musician; the actor remained longest connected with the dancer.—The architect represents neither a Dionysian, nor an Apollinian condition; here it is the great act of will, the will which removes mountains, ecstasy of strong will that is desirous of art. The most powerful men have always inspired architects; the architect has always been under the suggestion of power. In the work of architecture pride, triumph over gravity and will to power, are intended to display themselves; architecture is a sort of eloquence of power embodied in forms, sometimes persuading, even flattering, and sometimes merely commanding. The highest feeling of power and security is expressed ...